Big Energy-Little Learners...Can I do it all?

This activity goes with our Meat Eater unit which you can see  here This activity was insanely simple to put together and very enjoyable for Little Dragon.  First I had him go in search of all of his animals: dinosaurs, jungle animals, and zoo animals.   He enjoyed the hunt and bringing each find to me and telling me about the animal.  While he searched for his animals I made out two sheets of paper one titled Meat Eaters the other Plant Eaters.  (You can find a printable version at the bottom of this post) First he sorted the animals into the right category Then we went over what made each category different.  Not only by their diet but by other characteristics.  We wrote these down together.  (You can find a printable version at the bottom of this post) We kept these sheets to help us identify other animals he found in his toy box or we saw in movie through out the week. Printables Title Sheets...

Creation Day 6 Day 6 of creation God created animals and man to rule over the animals.  We have kept our focus mostly on animals, last year was more on man, and our theme is an animal.  Our activity for this day was meant for a better understanding of animals.   The Dragons sorted animals by habitat.  For this activity I used sea creatures, birds, and dinosaurs.  Beings God had created all living creatures by day 6 I felt it was fitting.  The animals were lined up above a couple habitat drawings.  The Dragons took turns choosing an animal and placing it in a habitat of dry land, water, garden/yard, and trees.  We reviewed the placement once all animals were in a home.  There were a couple that needed moved.  But our papers were all filled up and every animal found a perfect home. 

I am going to do my best to follow and post a theme of activities each week to do during the summer.  These activities will include fun outdoor activities, crafts, reading/storytelling, and other learning ideas. It is important to keep the mind fresh during summer break so kids are ready for school when it is time to go back. I am not taking it too heavy on the learning side, I want summer to be a fun time for exploring and play.  I still want the kids to look forward to summer break. This is the first year I am trying a 'plan' during the summer.  I will be posting our activities here and other activities on my Facebook page  Big Energy Little Learners. I hope you get inspired! Here are our activities for week 4: Week 4: ANIMAL FUN Animals are always something kids are interested in learning or hearing about.  There is only so much you can learn about an animal but that learning can get more detailed.   Children like to mimic animal...

With all the animals out from our animal bath we used the foam and the animals for some animal sorting. One of the first things about an animal you learn is where it lives or its habitat.  It is important to know this because it explains what it eats and other characteristics of the animal. I set the foam all around the split tray for easy sorting. Dark green:  Jungle or forest Light green:  meadow, grasslands, farm Tan:  desert Brown: swamp Blue: ocean The only thing I was missing was white, for ice, as was pointed out to me by Doll Dragon when she was looking for the home of the penguin. There were some animals that could live in multiple habitats, for these animals The Dragons placed 1 in each area. Doll Dragon sorted the  animals so fast Little Dragon didn't have much of a chance to sort, but he can get more practice later.  He still learned by observing. :) This was a quick activity that did...

Bible We are moving on to the story of The Prodigal Son  this week.  I think this is a hard story for preschoolers to understand.  After reading the story to The Dragons I asked what was the lesson/moral for this story, Doll Dragon answered 'thankfulness because the son was thankful he got clothes." We went over the main events of the story again and I explained to them that Jesus was trying to teach people of God's love, comparing it to the love of the father in the story.  Hopefully the concept will grow as we re-read the story this week. Purple The Dragons went on a hunt for purple things.  They didn't find much, no picture. The Dragons practiced their handwriting by writing the word 'purple' with purple markers. Alphabet The Dragons made their pencil toppers.  Today they really enjoyed decorating them.  It was more then handwriting practice, it was nice. I introduced our hand motion.  Use your left  hand for the line and ma...

We worked on q for a couple weeks.  Little Dragon was not quite getting the letter so we took an extra week.  I also got sick so keeping to schedule was difficult. Bible We had a few stories to get through this week because the following lesson week we are focusing on David and Goliath. Q comes from the quail God provided during the Israelite's time in the wilderness. Our verse this week "My God will take care of all your needs." -Philippians 4:19 We also read about parting the Red Sea, the ten commandments, and Ruth and Naomi. There wasn't much to do with the white board for these stories. We did talk about the things God has provided for us, our blessings.  We also talked about the commandments.  There wasn't as much discussion on this, Little Dragon is only 3 and is still learning to listen to our rules I didn't want to overdue it adding all commandments.  There were a couple things that he could understand such as 'obey your parents'...

Animals I simply took some scrap paper wrote 'Animals' on it and taped it on the folder.  This is how I titled all of the folders.  Inside the folder on the left I wrote the different activities there are for the folder.  Example:  Matching Categorizing Reading Spanish I placed all the magnets in a zip up Ziploc bag and labeled it.  I only had double of one animal page for matching so not all of the animals have a match.  I bought a couple packs of foam stickers at Joanne's on sale last year and used a bunch of those.  Because of the variety of animals I had I had the idea to sort the animals by where they live: Land vs. Water, type: insect vs. animal, how they move: flying vs. walking.  There are many other category's you could go into with this file folder but those are all I have now.  I did the divided multiple pieces of paper up into 9 sections and wrote the English and Spanish name for every animal magnet I have...

For this summer I have been trying to do an activity a day then letting the kids play the rest of the day.  :) I downloaded a calendar from Motherhood on a Dime with ideas that I have been referencing when I don't have any. Mostly I only have to substitute the days there are outdoor activities because it has been raining and grey for a week.  :/ Monday we played with story cards for over an hour! I found this picture on google images to give you idea of what the cards look like Story cards are double sided picture cards.  You can play the game in a variety of ways.  We played this two different ways. First I dealt each person 5 cards.  1 player starts the story and then everyone takes a turn laying down a card using it in the story.   I allowed a couple sentences per card for the kids. Second we put the stack of cards in the middle of the table.  Each turn we would pick up the top card and have to add what we pulled to the story.  ...