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

Creation Day 4 On this day God created the sun, moon, and placed the stars in the sky. Our activity this week made a great addition to our classroom decorations.  Materials:  Black construction paper cut in half horizontally Pictures of stars, sun, and moon tape yarn paint I drew a sun, a moon, and three stars on yellow construction paper and the dragons painted them The Dragons took their time with the project.  They really enjoyed painting these shapes.  They explained the reason for every color to each other while they were painting.  It was adorable.  Once the paint was dry The Dragons cut out their shapes and we taped them onto the yarn pieces.  For some reason they though these would be great hats.  I told them they were meant to be hung up but they insisted.  So on top of the heads they went!  They loved them!  They were great hats for a bit. When they finished playing we hung t...

Our last week of preschool was not too busy and had such a wonderful theme for the coming summer.  After we finished this week we had a small pizza party with all of the kids who joined us throughout the year.  It was great fun completing all of these lessons. Crafts Ascension craft Materials:  Drawn picture of Jesus cotton balls blue paper glue marker First we made clouds using the cotton balls.   To make this craft a little more then just glue we pulled apart the cotton balls to make more shapely clouds.  This craft was to meant to illustrate Jesus ascending to heaven.  In the Bible it says Jesus was covered by clouds and his disciples could not see him.  We used our cotton balls to cover Jesus.  I was a bit worried The Dragons would be upset covering up their art work but they had no problem with this.  I think they had a better understanding of the bible story/ and c...

This is our last week of preschool.  After this there will be no more folders only summer fun activities. For our last week our theme is the universe.  I am very excited about this theme and got a bit carried away on space books at the library. :) Bible We read the story of Jesus ascending to heaven behind a cloud. Bible Verse: He was taken up before their very eyes; and a cloud hid Him from their sight. - Acts 1:9   We will get more into this story as the week progresses but today we mainly focused on what Jesus asked of us before he ascended. He asked us to tell the world about Him! He told his apostles of the holy spirit and sharing what they learned with the world. To keep this message in mind we used play dough.  I started making an earth with play dough while we talked about what Jesus did for us.  When I was closer to being finished I asked The Dragons to guess what I was making.  I gave them a hint that it had to do with the job Jesus g...

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 3: Week 3-QUESTS AND ADVENTURES This was a spectacular week for imaginative play!  There were many story starters for our adventures and sharing of ideas.  These adventures were limitless.  We traveled many places and saw ...

This busy bag went great with both our space theme and our adventure theme.  We took many adventures through space together while reading some fun books and this was another way for The Dragons to visualize what is in space. Before I brought out the busy bag we read a book called About Space .  It was a nice read for children, not boring, and full of info about our galaxy and solar system. This busy bag helped further the understanding of some new words we learned this week.  Such as meteor, asteroid, comet, planets, space station, and satellite. This busy bag includes:  various pictures of planets asteroids stars space shuttles space stations satellites telescopes and more!   The main part of the busy bag is a sheet of paper that has two columns; Planets and Not Planets.   The Dragons sorted all of the pictures into one of the two categories.  I left The Dragons to this activity while prepping a snack. ...

We read an adorable book about the moon and this moon crater experiment was a great way to continue the adventure from the book. The book:  This was one of the books The Dragons picked off the shelf.  Our theme for preschool this week was space, this book has a big moon on the front so they picked it out.  It looked like an adventure book as well so it was very fitting for the week.  Opening up this book was an adventure all right! I enjoyed reading it and The Dragons enjoyed listening. They were very intrigued with the man who kept coming into the boy's room.  He was so mysterious.  In the end of the book the little boy goes to the moon to have his own adventure.  The pictures in this book were big and beautiful.   The pictures of the moon showed the craters.  In other moon books it is a glowing ball so this was perfect for out experiment.  Set up Materials:  small pan or bin flour marbles or jaw breakers ima...

We read Robots on Mars  for our reading adventure today.  The Dragons seemed to like this book, it wasn't my favorite, it didn't make a lot of logical sense. After we read this book though we took a trip into space.  We built our space ship and put on our space suites . (We just pretended to step in them, zip them up, and put on helmets.) We also had to gear ourselves with guns for protection from the bad aliens. The Dragons got so creative with this!  They were finding many items to use for our pretend play. They used a keyboard tablet for the navigation system and we all had to have 'radios' to contact each other with. There were also many planets to visit in the solar system, made up of punch balloons We went on several missions together and defeated a giant red striped alien race who had big claws and spikes on it's tail. I don't have many pictures because we were too busy playing to be interrupted by a camera. :) To see more of o...