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

This activity went with our meat eater unit you can see here This was a spontaneous art activity we did on a snow day from school.  It kept us busy inside and we were able to use the easel!  We don't get that out very often anymore.  Materials paper markers crayons imagination There are always many directions you can go with art.  I have found that giving a couple starting guidelines helps my dragons get started.  Once they have a starting point their imaginations begin to roll and they come up with many of their own ideas, some similar to the starting point and some far off on something else.  Both dragons ended up making 3 drawings!  One reason I picked this activity is because Little Dragon will be starting kindergarten this fall and part of the testing is drawing a person.  Little Dragon has never been huge on drawing or painting so I wanted to gauge where he was on his people drawing skills.  To start the dragons of...

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.   ...

A great book for our Summer week on bugs.  The illustrations are very colorful and busy.  There are also little hidden dressed up bugs throughout the book.  Of course this book also rhymes which makes it awesome! The Dragons took some time looking at each page before we turned it.  There was just so much to look at and laugh at. After we read the book we made... I love this craft because foam sticks to almost anything when it is wet.  These will be perfect for a fun bath later. Materials:  foam scissors sharpie pencil First we drew our bugs with pencil, just in case there was a mistake.  Then outlined them with sharpie.  Next we cut them out.  Foam is really easy to cut, even with safety scissors.  When they were finished we squirted the white board with water so the bugs would all stick.  We did some bug identification using our new bug friends.  The Dragons named all the bugs w...

I love hearing creative stories from my dragons.  They are usually so creative and sometimes so random!  I think this is great.  It gives some insight into how a preschooler things, where they get some of their abstract ideas, and how innocent and unshaped they still are. I always tell myself I will take more time for story telling and fail often.  I give The Dragons opportunities to tell stories with story boards but sometimes the real creativity come out when they have an adult audience. For our summer bug theme I encouraged The Dragons to take on the mindset of a bug and tell me a story from their perspective. This was easier for Summer Dragon, the oldest of the group who is with us during summer break.  Doll Dragon had a harder time putting herself in someone else's shoes per-say, Little Dragon didn't really grasp the concept so he just told me a story. Summer Dragon was an ant in his story.  I started him off by giving him a paperclip to lo...