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Category: Ages 2-6: Theme Time (age 2-4)

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Ages 2-6: Fall Theme / Ages 2-6: Theme Time (age 2-4)

Fall Theme Activities

We’ve been doing a lot of fall related activities–especially for our 2 and 4 year olds. We’ve had a lot of fun with this unit so far! The girls had a blast making this fall display with fall flowers, leaves, pipe cleaners, buttons and fall-colored pasta. I’ve seen this tree-hand-print activity a number of places on the Internet and ED really enjoyed it (she’s done several this past week).  I...

Fall Theme Activities (Indian Corn Experiment) 0

Ages 2-6: Fall Theme / Ages 2-6: Theme Time (age 2-4)

Fall Theme Activities (Indian Corn Experiment)

 A teacher shared this fall-related science activity — soaking Indian corn in a bit of water to see what would happen.  We have a large tray with a paper towel and about 1/4 inch of water. We also pour water over the cob every 2 or 3 days. By day 2 we saw a few sprouts. And after a week, there was quite a bit of growth.  Our acorns, on...

More Fall-Themed Activities 4

Ages 2-6: Fall Theme / Ages 2-6: Theme Time (age 2-4)

More Fall-Themed Activities

The girls really liked this crow popcorn seed counting activity.  DD and I worked on counting by 2s (up to 10) and 10s (up to 100).  Meanwhile, ED simply worked on one-to-one correspondence counting up to 10. She did this a number of times as well! I printed this from kidssoup.com. There are some great fall-themed printables at Print Activities LD did skip counting by 3s up to 300 and...

Pets Theme — Patterns, Countin’ Whiskers Blindfold Game, Colors 0

Ages 2-6: Theme Time (age 2-4)

Pets Theme — Patterns, Countin’ Whiskers Blindfold Game, Colors

This week ED and DD are going with a pet theme for some of their activities. Even before I could finish printing things out DD was bursting at the seams to play! This is a pattern matching game from http://kidssoup.com/  (a paid website whose graphics and activity ideas are wonderful and well worth the membership fees for us — ages 2-6 or so — we use it all the time...

Egg-speriments! 14

Ages 2-6: Bird Unit / Ages 2-6: Theme Time (age 2-4) / Science Experiments

Egg-speriments!

To make our bird unit especially appealing to LD we, of course, had to add in some science egg-speriments! While DD and I were unable to smash our eggs… LD did!!  We’re not quite sure why, but then when he tried it with a second egg he couldn’t break it no matter how hard he tried.  Anyway, this experiment was designed to show how strong egg shells are and how...

And more Egg-speriments! (Eggs and Pollution) 4

Ages 2-6: Bird Unit / Ages 2-6: Theme Time (age 2-4) / Science Experiments

And more Egg-speriments! (Eggs and Pollution)

We looked at the air bubbles coming out of this egg when it was placed in vinegar and talked about why the shell is porous.  This lets the growing embryo get oxygen.  We then talked about how since it is porous it can let things through — like acid (vinegar), acid rain and pollutants.  We talked about DDT (how eagles nearly became extinct)– and how poisons, pesticides and so forth...

The Developing Chick-Egg Set 4

Ages 2-6: Bird Unit / Ages 2-6: Theme Time (age 2-4) / Science

The Developing Chick-Egg Set

This summer, I saw a really interesting tool for studying chickens at My Montessori Journey.  It was a chicken hatching set that you can buy for about $35.  It was a great idea, but I decided the kids might get more out of it making their own.  So, earlier this summer at Grams’ house, I printed out some chicken embryo pictures.  One set has the developing chicken embryo with the...

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Ages 2-6: Bird Unit / Ages 2-6: Preschool (Age 4) / Ages 2-6: Preschool and Toddler Activities / Ages 2-6: Theme Time (age 2-4)

Bird Unit Activities

Last night I set up the table with a few more bird-related activities. These are activities for my 2 1/2 and 4 year olds: In the middle of the table are styrofoam eggs. The girls decorated them with plastic push pins (I don’t know what else to call them!) and colorful brads.  I also set out a bird identification set and the bird lapbook we made years ago. The girls...

Bird Unit 2

Ages 2-6: Bird Unit / Ages 2-6: Theme Time (age 2-4)

Bird Unit

I showed this picture last week, I think, but what better visual to go with our bird unit! We have started off the year with a new bird unit. We did a pretty extensive bird unit last year and learned all about galahs, magpies, Murray magpies and Port Lincoln parrots (lots of pictures in the “Where we Live” label). We did a lovely lapbook to go with those (I just...

Bird’s Egg Craft 0

Ages 2-6: Bird Unit / Ages 2-6: Preschool and Toddler Activities / Ages 2-6: Theme Time (age 2-4) / Arts and Crafts

Bird’s Egg Craft

This activity would probably be perfect around Easter!  This summer as I wandered around Hobby Lobby I saw all the cute colored brads.  Not just the plain round ones as were available in our town last year, but flowers, hearts and things like that.  I picked up a couple boxes of brads, a push-pin looking thing I also saw at H-L or Michaels and a bunch of styrofoam eggs.  All...

Bird Related Activities 0

Ages 2-6: Bird Unit / Ages 2-6: Preschool (Age 4) / Ages 2-6: Preschool and Toddler Activities / Ages 2-6: Theme Time (age 2-4) / Math: Preschool Math

Bird Related Activities

So aside from learning about the birds in our area (which are all new to the kids), I also selected a number of general bird and chicken activities to slip into their workboxes. Here are a couple they did today: DD had this chicken grid game from prekinders.com in her workbox today for math.  We played with two dice and she had to try adding them together.  That’s quite challenging...

Theme Time: Bears 0

Ages 2-6: Preschool (Age 4) / Ages 2-6: Theme Time (age 2-4)

Theme Time: Bears

Today the theme time table was on bears. At breakfast we read Blueberries for Sal and Bearobics. Blueberries for Sal is such a sweet story. It’s a Caldecott Winner from 1948. I grew up canning blueberry jam (we had lots of blueberry bushes) so I always have a good talk about that with the kids when we read that book. I also really like Bearobics. It’s a rap, counting book,...

Theme Time: Bears (cont.) 0

Ages 2-6: Preschool (Age 4) / Ages 2-6: Theme Time (age 2-4)

Theme Time: Bears (cont.)

ED played with the little panda bears all day! She even took them in the car on errands. We followed up the re-enactment of Goldilocks (post above) later in the day with a cute book called Beware of the Bears, which picks up when the bear family comes home. They follow Goldilocks to her house and wreak havoc there. DD cut out the parts (above) and made a moveable polar...

Theme Time: Human Body 2

Ages 2-6: Preschool (Age 4) / Ages 2-6: Theme Time (age 2-4) / Science

Theme Time: Human Body

I set out some activities related to the humanbody on Thursday, but we didn’t get to themuntil Friday. On Thursday, we went to a wonderful show aboutdinosaurs. It’s a show based at the museum inSydney but they brought it here for a couple of days.Essentially it was a puppet show with dinosaurs.LD and DD both got to go on stage — and LD wasalso in the ultimate act–being “eaten” by...