Pre-school, Toddlers, and More!

Snack sized Pringles cans work great for word worm cans.

My pre-school kids are working on emergent reading and writing.  To work on letter recognition, and writing letters and words, we use our word worm cans to recognize sight words. Each child's word worm can contains words that pertain to the interests of that child. They give the can a shake, pull a word out and identify it. They also copy the words from their worms onto a sheet of writing paper. 

 Another thing we've started doing during our pre-school time is book writing. We've written a variety of simple "reading" books for the kids to take home and read to their parents.

When I introduced book writing to the kids we decided on a few rules. First, each book must have a cover with the author's name on it. Second, each child as an author gets to choose the content - picture they draw - of their book. And Third, each book must be at least two pages long.

 The kids draw the pictures, I help them spell the words, and they put as many pages - at least two - into their books as they like.

This book is an example of the "Turkey, Turkey, What do You See?" books we wrote for Thanksgiving.

With my two year olds - actually all my kids want a turn - we've been working with Sensory Boxes. One week we did sea shells with colored rice.


Coloring rice:  Add about 1 tsp rubbing alcohol and several drops of food coloring along with rice to a zip lock bag then spread out to dry.

The following week we did moon sand with dinosaurs.  The moon sand was a tad on the messy side, but the kids LOVED it.


Moon sand: 8 cups flours and 1 cup baby oil.

And then we did different types of dried beans with scoops, small backhoes, diggers and dump trucks.

For our really little ones we introduced our milk cap game. They enjoyed putting the caps in, opening the container, and then dumping them out so they could do it all over again.  I have also done this one with different sized pom poms.