Author: Liesl - Homeschool Den
To introduce the concept of symmetry to my preschoolerwe played the “copy me game.” (That’s what I called it.)First I put down an object and she had to put one in it’smirror image (I showed her how if I folded the paper overit would be right in that spot where the paper touchedon the other side.) Then she had to put down an objectand I had to copy her. We...
DD did a unit on apples these past couple of weeks. Hereare some of the things she did. First picture: The apple picking game — Each of us hadour own apple picking sheet from kidssoup.com. (You have to pay a yearly fee to join this site, but I’ve gotten a lot of great ideas from there.) We took turns rolling the dice and placing that many apples(round red magnets) onto...
DD, ED and I made apple muffins. They were AMAZINGLY good! (U.S. Measurements) INGREDIENTS: 2 cups unbleached flour3/4 cup sugar1 Tblsp b powder3/4 teaspoon baking soda1 tsp cinnamon1/4 tsp nutmeg1/4 tsp ground allspice1/4 tsp ground cloves (I didn’t have any so used pumpkin pie spice)1/4 tsp salt1/2 cup walnuts (I didn’t have any walnuts or pecans so just added an extra 1/2 cup of apples)2 large eggs4 Tblsp unsalted, melted...
Game — After coloring the pig and apples we played pinthe apple into the pigs mouth. We used some other appleswe had on hand because we played with friends.http://www.dltk-kids.com/crafts/luau/mpinapple.html Apple Counting — I have lots of number sheets on hand (seethe second picture) for the kids to do stamping. This timeI gave her a bit of red paint to make fingerprint appleson her sheet. I asked if she wanted to...
We’ve never melted crayons before and I read somewherethat someone had melted the crayons and then used cookiecutters to cut them into shapes. “Wow,” I thought, “Ican use those cute fall cookie cutters we have.” Well, we used very cheap crayons (we had boxes left overfrom a large function) and it looked plain weird. Thewax separated out and it looked muddy orangish-brown. I just left the pan to cool. Only...
We talked about the life cycle of an apple (accordian bookfrom kidssoup) and then glued in a little A book we gotfrom http://www.homeschoolshare.com/alphabet_notebook.php We also did the Aa apple sorting game from homeschoolsharebut I didn’t take a picture of it. I recommend you check out the the (free) alphabet notebookat homeschoolshare if your preschooler is learning lettersthis year http://www.homeschoolshare.com/alphabet_notebook.php The last picture is called 100 apples. We did this activitytogether....
DD painted a big apple tree, Mom cut out holesfor the apples and they tried to throw the applesinto the holes.
Idea from http://kidssoup.com/ My toddler enjoyed doingher own tree. As you may have noticed from the past couple of picturesI save the lids from glass jars to use for glue or smallamounts of paint. It makes clean up easy as I just throwthe lid in the rubbish bin when we’re done.
Here are two final picture from our apple unit, again this isfrom kidssoup.com. Match the apple to the right wordfamily tree. There was also a cute matching activity for sight words —match the worm to the apple. We only used a few of thesecards, but can pull it out later when it’s appropriate.
Our tornado in a bottle didn’t turn out as well as the ones online did, but we did get it to work. (It didn’t work when we used food dye, oil and water. everything turned red.) LD wanted to “do his own experiment” with the oil and food dye (which he noticed formed bubbles in the oil). He put the oil and dye on a leaf, broke the bubbles...
We have been doing a unit on natural disasters. We have yet to put our lapbook together, but I’ll share some of the activities we did. (Still to come in the next couple of days is the tornado activity.) Update: We have a new Natural Disasters Packet. See you again soon here or Homeschool Den Facebook page. Don’t forget to Subscribe to our Homeschool Den Newsletter! ~Liesl You can find out more about...
The majority of damage from hurricanes comes from heavy winds. We watched a youtube video about hurricanes where the wind blew the roof off of a house. Then we did our own activity. We built a house out of index cards and then tested their strength with level one winds (one straw). Seeing that the house blew down, we reinforced it (with more tape). It then withstood the level one...
Our next activity was to recreate a tsunami. In a flat pan, the kids built up a sandy beach (sand, corn flour) and built little houses. Then they added water and created an earthquake. It didn’t work when the kids hit the table with the bat, but when the table was given a good shake the tsunami hit fill force! We looked...
Last January we made a volcano out of paper mache. This time around we just used sand and corn flour. The mixture actually dried to rock hard (later), but the kids didn’t have the patience to wait a full day. Of course we had to make our “lava” realistic by using not just baking soda and vinegar but also red food dye and dish soap (to add to the foaming...