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More Stars! {Preschool Shapes}

October 10, 2012 by

Hope you and your little ones have been having fun with the star projects from last week’s post.  Here are a few more star ideas to keep the shape-learning rolling!  Today, we’ll be working on Star Puppets!

 

What You Need:

  • Paper Plate
  • Scissors
  • Yellow Paint (or color of your choice)
  • Popsicle Stick
  • Star Pattern Printable (if you’re as bad at free-handing things as me!)
  • Masking Tape

What You Do:

Using the star printable page as a template, trace a star on a paper plate.  I found that doing it on the back of the plate provides a little flatter star, but doing it on the front of the plate helps contain the paint (a little!).  Your call!

Now for the fun part – painting!  One of our younger day care kids (18 months) started out by putting a dab of yellow on each point.  I thought it was so cute!

 

The kids had lots of fun painting the star!

 After the paint is dry, cut the star out (if you have an older preschooler, they might be able to do this themselves) and then tape a popsicle stick to the back.  We were gluing the popsicle stick, but I find that packing tape works a lot better!

After we were done, we used the puppets while singing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.  The kids got a real kick out of it!

More Star Resources and Ideas!

Use Star Stickers in this Super Simple Flag Craft

Star Theme Unit from Preschool Express (check out the cute sea star rhyme)

Lots of simple shape printouts including one with two smaller stars on it from Under 5

Connect the Dots: Straight Star and Curvy Star from KidZone

Lots of Shape Worksheets including a “Color by Shape” one

 

About the Author:

Lindsey Whitney is a blogger over at Growing Kids Ministry.  A blog designed to help parents, teachers, and Children’s Ministry workers who want to help the kids they love grow in their faith.  Check out her full profile here.

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Stars {Preschool Shapes}

October 3, 2012 by

We’ve been having a lot of fun with shapes around here and I’m really surprised at all the non-basic shapes Chipmunk is now able to recognize.  For example, we were looking through the Love Heart Learning – Shapes ebook (I grabbed it while it was free, don’t spend $5 on it!) and she knew trapezoid!  Impressive.

This week, we focused in on stars.  One of the day care kids has a  Twilight Sea Turtle and she brought it in for us all to look at the stars.  It was a lot of fun except one of the kids hated turning out the lights, so we couldn’t play with it for too long. 

I love how the little stars really sparkle in this book!

Our Week’s Activities

Book: The Sea Mice and the Stars

Songs: Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star

Crafts: Masking Tape Star, Watercolor Resist Star

Family Activity: Looking at the stars in the backyard

Masking Tape Star

What You Need:

Star Pattern Printable  (PDF format)

Masking Tape

Paint and brush

What You Do:

Show the toddler (or baby) the star and ask them if they know what it is.  Tell them you’ll be painting the star today. As you put masking tape over the lines on the star, ask them where stars live.  You could even sing Twinkle Twinkle while you work.  (Don’t like singing?  Check out Freegal — a service provided through your local library where you can get thousands of songs free!!!)

Once the star is all taped up, let your child paint away!  Once they are done painting, remove the masking tape (slowly!). I found that if you take the tape off while the paint is still wet, it doesn’t rip the paper as much.  Your lines might not be quite as straight, but that’s okay!

 

Watercolor Resist Star 

This activity is great for even the littlest of hands!

What You Need:

Star Pattern Printable

White crayon

Water Colors and brush

What You Do:

Before child comes to the craft table, color in the star with white crayon.  My resist didn’t come through very strongly, so make sure you color in with bold lines and fill in all the space.  Introduce the shape to your child and talk about stars you’ve seen lately.

Allow your child to paint with watercolors.  The paint should resist the white crayon and only go on the outside of the star.  Watercolor is a great low-mess paint, so even older infants can participate in this craft.   Take a look!

These kids are stars in my book, that’s for sure!

What about You?

What are some fun ways you teach your preschooler about stars?

Free Shape Ebooks and Apps (I don’t know how good these are!)

Stay tuned next week for another star activity!

About the Author

Lindsey Whitney is a blogger over at Growing Kids Ministry.  A blog designed to help parents, teachers, and Children’s Ministry workers who want to help the kids they love grow in their faith.   You can connect with her via twitter or on facebook.

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Three Little Pigs: Masks {Preschool Reading Comprehension}

September 19, 2012 by

Did I mentioned my daughter is obsessed with The Three Little Pigs?  Well, she is!  We’ve checked out 5 different versions from the library and read them every day.  A lot.  Today we decided to do a little work with colors and a little bit with reading comprehension, using face masks!  Let’s get started!

What You Need:

  • Heavy Duty Paper Plates (4 Total)
  • Red and White Paint (to make pink)
  • Black and White Paint (to make gray)
  • Paint brushes
  • Popsicle sticks
  • Packing Tape
  • Marker/Crayon to add faces

What You Do:

I wanted to show the kids a little bit about mixing colors, so instead of dishing out the pink and gray paint, I put a little dab of red & white on the pig plates and a dab of black & white on the wolf plates.
We talked about the colors mixing as the kids painted and then I got all excited when a new color started to emerge.  Even the baby (13 months) got into painting on this one!  Thankfully, he’s almost past the “eat everything” stage.
Almost.
After the plates were dry, we drew little faces on them to represent the three pigs and one wolf.  I was in charge of the wolf and as you can see, my artistic ability is very limited.
Here’s the masterpieces from the kids (and one more from me)
We used packing tape to secure Popsicle sticks to the back of the plates and then headed outside for some role playing.
We have read several versions of the pig story (many times) so I was anxious to see what Chipmunk came up with when we started playing.   She remembered almost all of the story line, but especially making a house of BRICKS!
Later, we played Three Little Pigs with her tiny playhouse.  Our dialogue went like this:
Me: Little pig, little pig, let me in!
Her: Not by the hairs of my chin chin chin
Me: Can I just put my paw in?
Her: No!
Me: Can I just put my tail in?
Her: No!
Me: Can I come in for tea?
Her: Oh sure!!
Me: Haha!  Now I will eat you!
Her: Don’t eat me.  I have donuts!!

What About You?

How do you make reading come to life for your kids?

More Resources:

Three Little Pigs Halloween Costume! 

Three Little Pigs Retelling from Reading Confetti (Legos and Straws)

About the Author:

Lindsey Whitney is a blogger over at Growing Kids Ministry.  A blog designed to help parents, teachers, and Children’s Ministry workers who want to help the kids they love grow in their faith.   You can connect with her via twitter or on facebook.

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FREE: 29 Cool Math Games for Preschoolers

August 29, 2012 by

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I have spent quite some time pulling together all these links, ideas, etc to help you teach your preschoolers numbers and shapes with tons of free cool math games for preschoolers!  If you keep the kids having fun, they never realize they are learning!

Online Cool Math Games for Preschoolers

1.  Help Greenelle count her toys!

2.  Numbers Matching Game at Kaboose

3.  Ant Parade - Sort the ants by number and color!

7.  Help Purpy find his favorite shapes!

Printable Cool Math Games for Preschoolers

This section has several that I have made for y’all!  I hope you enjoy all of the themed cool math games that I have made.  If you are wanting a specific theme, just email me to ask.  You might see it go live on 3 Boys and a Dog, Deals!

1.  Domino Math - Bunches of free math worksheets for using dominoes

2.  5 Little Monkeys is a great book and these printables go right along with it!

3.  A Peek Into Our Day at Crystal and Company shows how she school her brood using manipulatives and free printables!

4. Big and Little Dinosaurs Printables here at Deals_3BD

5. Preschool Child Development Activities for ages 3 and 4 is an ongoing series of posts here at Deals_3BD.  Check in each week for the newest ones!

Make Your Own Cool Math Games for Preschoolers

1.  Play “Battle” with only the numerical playing cards.  Little ones have a hard time with the A, K, Q, and J but using just the numbers helps them to not only recognize greater and smaller, but their numbers!

2.  Blue Bean Counting Game from education.com takes a few items from around your home to play!

3.   Use Your Muffins Tins – Tape numbers in the bottom of the cups of an old muffin tin. Have the child place the corresponding amount of items, such as buttons, erasers or snacks, in the corresponding tin.

4. Crocodile Counting – Free Paint strips and some clothes pins make this a fun counting game!

5. Clean Counting - This is one we have ALWAYS done.  When my boys were little (well, even now LOL!)  we had them clean their rooms by doing it a few at a time.  Go find 2 items to throw away… put away 5 cars… get 4 pieces of dirty laundry out.  They counted AND cleaned their room.

6.  Nine Learning Games you can make at home or do with household items.

7. The Giant Pattern Blocks idea from The Educator’;s Spin On It looks like MEGA fun for your little ones.

8.  Monster Truck Math at Kids Activities Blog looks like such a fun way to get your boys learning!  She also has a neat post about using Dominoes for Cool Preschool Math games!

Purchase-able Cool Math Games for Preschoolers

These are bonus games since they cost money, but they are totally worth it!

 

Be sure to visit Susie QT Pies for a complete list of Back to School Helpers.  Her big list of links includes many Math ones. Smile

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