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

Because Little Dragon is in an outside preschool now I did not make a lesson plan for this year.  I have been trying to supplement the things he is learning there, here.  His teachers do not have a lesson plan or a syllabus that I can use as a reference so I am blind to what we will be learning until I see his teachers after school on Mondays. Some weeks what they are learning about is something we have gone over already at home or Little Dragon simply is not interested in learning more about.  On these weeks I ask him what he wants to learn about.  Together we pick a letter he is struggling with and assign a topic to it.  It been working out quiet nicely. This Week  Little Dragon has been learning about The 3 Bears so we got out the magnetic board and did some story telling. Little Dragon practiced his handwriting by writing the story title himself. He also practiced some art skills by drawing the house details for the Bears.   ...

b vs d is imperative to learn.  They look similar, their names sound kind of similar, and their letter sounds are even similar. I tried teaching this awhile ago and it didn't seem to stick.  I assumed it was just going to take a lot of practice.  That is until this year.  I found something that stuck!  It is a little different but Little Dragon has not struggled at all since we identified b and d separately using this method.  It all started when Little Dragon would always tell me butt began with b during our b week.  This gave me an idea.  I drew a lowercase b and a lowercase d on our white board. Little Dragon went back and fourth on which was which unable to decide with confidence.  Then I asked him when we read a book, do we start with the left or the right?  He answered left and pointed to the left side of each letter .  I drew eyes at the top left of each letter.  Then I said now look at the letters. ...

The end of our b week was heavy on activities that did not include pencil and paper. Bible We read the story of Jesus walking on water again and touched on Jesus calming the storm.  I did not feel like the kids were grasping this concept completely.  To help I looked for a video for a visual retelling. There were many videos on this and we watched a couple. Together we also played out both stories.  I put on some awesome storm sounds in the background.  After the main story was told we ran into a couple sea monsters and made port in California.  I have no idea where 'California' came from. In the picture Doll Dragon is on the boat and Little Dragon is swimming in the sea. A fun way to experiment and talk about Jesus walking on water is Obleck!  Our obleck was blue to appear close to water.  Obleck sits as a liquid but if you apply pressure to it it becomes solid.  It is quiet neat.  Because of these properties we talked...

Boats.  It is all about boats this week.  The time Jesus spent on boats and more fun stuff. Bible Our focus is still on Jesus and this week we are taking about Jesus calming the storm and walking on water.  The kids did awesome with this unit.  We did some crafts that I break down below.  During each craft we talked about our bible stories and added something about Jesus to each of them. We used the boat puppet to help illustrate the story of Jesus calming the storm.  We discussed how Jesus walked on water and how Peter walked on water and the differences there.  Are song this week was "I have peace of a river in my soul" I liked this song it was very catchy.  Our bible verse is "those on the boat worshiped him and said 'truly you are the son of God'".   -Matthew 14:33 I checked out a book from the library for us to read some stories of Jesus from a different source. Miracles Crafts Boat puppet materials: ...