Valentine Math for Preschoolers

Preschoolers need lots of experience with sorting, counting, and patterning to develop their pre-math skills.  I love to make games for the preschoolers at my center to play.  Yes play, preschoolers learn through play, not ditto sheets.  So every skill you want them to learn needs to be in the form of a hands on, fun, sensory stimulating activity.  I am going to show you some of the activities I will be using with the preschoolers at my school during Valentines.  First you will need to cut about a bajillion hearts in various sizes and colors.  If you are lucky like me, you will find an organization that has an Ellison die cut machine (thanks M-Y Partnership for Children) and use the hound out of it.

The first game is a matching game.  Using black construction paper cut into 4ths, glue at least one pair of matching hearts per color to the paper.  If you make more than one pair of the same color it gives your children a greater opportunity for successfully finding a match.  But whatever you do don't use an odd number of colored cards or you will cause much frustration because they will never be able to  a match. Lol.

Here is a picture of all the hearts I cut and then laminated for extra durability.

With this pile of hearts, you can sort by size.  I have a small size, a medium, and a large.

Next I used a dry erase marker and wrote numbers on the large hearts and then you have the children count out the number of hearts indicated on the big heart.  The dry erase marker wipes off easily with a dry cloth on laminated items.  This way you can reuse the hearts of another activity.  You also see an example of sorting by color in this picture.

This picture shows patterning.  I used a sentence strip and added the hearts in a repeating pattern.  I used the simplest pattern in the example above.

This pattern is a little more difficult and would be used with your older preschoolers.

This would be the most challenging of the three patterning activities because they would have to chose the right color and the right size heart. 

I hope you found something you can use with the preschoolers in your life.  Thanks for reading.  Would love to hear from you and your activities.

Ephesians 1:16

Making Snowflakes

This has been a very unusual year here in the mountains, we have had very, very little snow.  So in the preschool we decided we were going to make our own snow.  I found this recipe that shows you how to make snowflakes from Borax and boiling water.  Here are the step by step instructions:

Start by boiling your water.  You don't really need to measure it at this point, you just need enought to fill a pint jar.

While your water is coming to a boil, you need to make a snowflake shape out of a pipe cleaner.  Here I used a white one so it would look like an actual snowflake. You then need to attach a piece of yarn to the snowflake and to a pencil or bamboo skewer so that you can suspend the snowflake in the Borax solution.  When we did this in the center, we used colored pipe cleaners.

Measure 1/3 of a cup of Borax.  Borax is an all natural laundry booster.  It is also used to clean many items in the home.  You can check out the 20 Mule Team website for other household tips.

Mix the boiling water and Borax completely.

Submerge the snowflake shaped pipe cleaner in the Borax water solution.

After the snowflake has been in the solution for a couple of days, it will begin to form crystals that attach to the pipe cleaner.

You can then remove the snowflakes from the solution and use them to decorate with.  They are not shelf stable, so they won't last forever, but you can enjoy them for the season.

Delicious Chicken Enchilada

OK, when your teenage son tells you something you make is the best he has ever had, well you just have to crow about it a little.  Last week I wanted to make chicken enchiladas, but didn't have exactly the ingredients my normal recipe calls for, so.... I improvised and it turned out wonderfully. I am going to give you a step by step tutorial of how I did this.  Sorry for not having pictures in the tutorial. I had no idea I would be posting this one until the last minute.  Next time I make it I will be sure to take pictures to add to the step by step.
Ingredients:  4 boneless, skinless chicken breast, 1 medium onion, 8 oz cream cheese, Ro-tel tomatoes, cooking oil, 8-10 tortillas, 1 jar salsa,  1 cup sour cream, 2 cups of shredded cheddar cheese.
1.  Boil 4 boneless skinless chicken breast until cooked through (you can cheat and skip this step by using canned chicken).
2.  Saute one medium onion that has been diced in 2 tablespoons of oil until translucent.
3.  When chicken is cooked, chop it up and add it to your onions.
4.  Add a can of Ro-tel tomatoes and heat through.
5.  Add a 8oz block of cream cheese (yes you can use reduced fat or fat free to reduce the fat and calories).
6.  Once the cheese is melted and all ingredients are combined, fill tortilla shells (I use whole wheat to increase the nutritional value) with mixture and place seam side down in a 9x13 dish.  It should make 8-10 enchiladas.
7.  In same pan you just used for filling, pour one jar of your favorite salsa and add 1cup of sour cream (can be reduced fat or fat free) and stir until completely combined. 
8.  Pour salsa mixture over enchiladas.
9.  Sprinkle with cheddar cheese
10. Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes.
11.  Enjoy!

This is a picture of the final meal.  It would be great if I still had preshoolers in the house I could teach the color yellow.  After teaching preschoolers for 13 years it is hard not to put a lesson into everything.    Also, don't you love the plate, it is from the Dollar Tree, $1. Love it!

Polar Bear Puff Paint

This week at the preschool we are doing activities dealing with polar bears and penguins.  I did my usual seach of my favorite sites for activities that apply to our area of study for the week.  Not really sure which site I got this idea from (sorry for not giving credit where credit is due).  But I will give you step by step instructions on how my students and I prepared this activity for the preschool.

First we gathered our materials for making the paint.  All you need are shaving cream and school glue.  This worked great for us because we are out of white paint in the preschool and I was afraid we would need to add that to the mixture, but no, just shaving cream and glue.

You then mix equal parts of glue and shaving cream.  It looks delicious, just like cool whip.  We also made a polar bear template from and old manila folder.  We used a picture of a polar bear and traced the outline on the manila folder.  We cut the polar bear out and then taped the folder back together.



Doesn't the paint look just like a bowl of Cool Whip?

Next we used a pretty blue construction paper for the background of the picture.  We placed the template of the polar bear on top and used a plastic spoon to cover the template with the puffy paint.

Remove the stencil and Voila!  We then let the kids put their finger in the paint and make puffy white snowflakes around their bear.



Monster Manipulatives

In the past few months that I have been blogging, I have posted quite a few post that deal with the suppers and thangs part of my blog, but very few that dealt with the youngans.  So....today I am giving you one for the youngans in your life.  I teach Early Childhood Education at a local high school.  This is a class that teaches high school students the basics of working in the early childhood profession.  I am also the director of our on campus preschool.  This is where my students work and practice the skills they learn in class.  So what I am sharing with you today is an actual activity I have planned to use with the preschool children this week.  We are doing a week of "Marvelous M."  Every activity that we do will begin with the letter M.  On Friday we have plans for several monster activities.  When I was making the plans I needed a manipulative (pre-math) activity to go with monsters.  I began my search on the Internet.  I was looking for printables that I could use to  make matching monsters for the children to practice their visual discrimination skills.  I didn't find anything that I really liked.  I knew I could free hand some monsters, but to get two free handed monsters that look just alike is near impossible.  Yes, I could have used the copier and simply made a copy of each monster so they would be exactly the same, but I had another idea. 

I decided I would free hand my own monsters making each one completely different.  They would be different colors and some would have legs and some wouldn't.

I cut them all out.  I decided some would have round eyes and some would have square eyes, some would have one eye and others would have two, some would have teeth, and some wouldn't, do you see where I am going with this?

I assembled the tools I needed to make the eyes, mouths, and teeth.  I free handed the eyeballs, squares and circles of varying sizes (monsters have these big uneven eyes so don't sweat it).  I used a hole punch to make the pupil of the eye and I mixed it up and made them of differing colors.  Then to make the mouths I free handed some black strips for the mouth and used decorative scissors with a jagged design to make the teeth.  A glue stick kept them all in place.

After I attached all their faces, I laminated them because I knew that after they were handled by 18 small little hands their faces would be falling off. 

You can have your children sort them by those that have legs and ......

Those that don't.  You can sort them by color, by those that have teeth and those that don't, those that have one eye and those with two eyes, those with round eyes and those that have square eyes. 

I hope you are inspired by these cute little monsters.  The old saying "necessity is the mother of invention" was sure the case as far as this activity was concerned. 

Renee