Preschooler Activities for Easter: Alpha and OmEGGa

For our activity time today, I wanted to put a new twist on dying eggs. This activity helps your preschooler practice matching their upper-case and lower-case letters. I highly suggest combining forces with a friend since you're dealing with dye and fragile boiled eggs. Even with my mom's help, we still ended up with tie-dyed hands and a smashed letter "I" egg. I think this activity is best for 3 and up.

Materials:

26 eggs

egg cartons

black marker

wax or white crayon

1 egg coloring kit

Step One: Boil 26 eggs and set them out to dry. Write each letter of the alphabet in lower case on the bottom of the egg cartons.

Step Two:
Use your crayon to write each letter of the alphabet in upper-case onto the boiled eggs. Have your preschooler write as many as they can on their own. I had my 3 year old write them on one side and I wrote the letter again on the opposite side of the egg just to make sure we could identify the letter once the egg was dyed.
(This is the crayon that came in our egg dying kit. I believe my mom bought it at Walmart.)

Step Three:
Dye your eggs! Best of luck to you during this part, my friend. My kids were naked.

Step Four:
Allow the colored eggs to dry. If any of the letters were illegible, I wrote over them with a marker. Then I placed all 26 eggs into a basket and told my preschooler that the Easter bunny needs her help to find the right spot for all those eggs. Then she had to pull out the upper-case letter eggs one by one and find the coresponding lower-case letter spot in the egg carton. Whenever she couldn't find a letter, we'd sing the alphabet song, pointing to the letters as we sang. On the unfamiliar lower-case letters, we talk about the shape of the letter and how it's similar to or different than the upper-case letter.

Have fun with this one! You could do numbers, shapes, or whatever you're needing to teach your little ones.

Tomorrow we're making little love birds for an Easter service project, so check back.

Toddler Activities for the Letter G

Well, we pulled into our driveway at 5:30am this morning at the end of a much needed reunion with my dad and sisters in Eugene, Oregon. I feel deeply tired; the kind of fatigue that hits you when you sit still for a minute and suddenly feel like you're spinning. We made the 14 hour trek in a speedy 17 hours on the way there, one week ago. It was one of those experiences that I hope to laugh about for a long time with my kids, when they're older. Anyone would know that driving that long with three kids under the age of four is risky, but it soon became HILARIOUS to me how much of an adventure we were having.
The plan was to leave by 10 am, so we left at 1:30 pm. Around 5pm, we were all getting antsy and anxious for Boise where we'd stop for dinner. About 50 miles outside of the city, we ran out of gas. My husband and I looked at each other in total shock. We had been so wrapped up in our book on CD (Hunger Games, book 2) and didn't even notice the little red light trying to warn us. Luckily we have AAA, so we waited on the side of the freeway for an hour while David took the girls way out into the grass and I nursed baby Eloise. At one point I looked out and saw my husband holding my three year old's legs while she went pee, trying his best to aim away from his feet. That was the high point of the trip for me.
We got back on the road, stopped for dinner and had our girls run circles (literally) around the Burger King. Around 2 am my husband pulled over for a rest (I wasn't helping much with the driving at that point) and just as he laid his head down onto a pillow, EVERYONE LOST IT. Our three year old was crying because she couldn't sleep, even though she'd just barely woken up; our two year old was miserable and wanted out, and the baby was just plain sick of being in a car seat. I could see the lack of sleep taking a toll on my husband's patience and offered to drive.
Around 3:30am, our three year old threw up and caught it in her hands. It was so unexpected and awful that it took me a second to even know what to do. We pulled over, cleaned her up, and got back on the road. Right as we pulled into my Dad's at 5:30am, she threw up again, just to end with a bang.

Needless to say, the vacation itself was much better than the drive! We're happy to be home and excited for Easter projects. I know, I'm behind but that's okay. I have our "letter of the week" from last week to share with you today. We talked about the letter "G."

We practiced upper-case and lower-case G's with " Glitter and Grains.

(It was kind of a stretch with the Grains part...)

We did some math with Grapes!

Glass slipper, goggles, glitter belt, golf ball, green flowers, girl...
Lot's of things to talk about with the letter G.

Check back tomorrow for Easter activities!

Fire Safety for Toddlers and Preschoolers

We left last weekend to spend some time at my in-laws with all of my husband's side of the family. There were 11 children under the age of eight, making 19 of us total in the house. On our first night together, the fire alarm went off at 3:30 am (I didn't even hear it go off--ah!). David's parents were the first to come out of their bedroom and see the smoke coming into the house from the door that led out to the garage. They started yelling "fire!" and banging on our bedroom doors. Within minutes, all of us were standing outside in the freezing cold, barefoot and coat-less, while the men ran inside to grab laptops and a few other valuables. We knew the fire must be in the garage, but by that point there was smoke pouring out of a small window above the house and we figured the entire thing would go down.

The fire department had been called immediately but my in-laws live up in the mountains, so we knew it might take a little while. We piled all of the children into my SUV and turned on the heat while we waited for our men. My husband had decided to crawl back into the kitchen and get a closer look at the source. When he saw that it was still contained by the metal door (that led out to the garage from the kitchen), he started pouring glasses of water onto the door. He called for his brother and dad and together they hooked up a hose in the utility closet and doused the door with water.

And it worked! Because the water turned to steam once it hit the burning door, it put out most of the fire that was concentrated just behind the door. When the fire department arrived, they told us that had our men not put the fire out when they did, the entire house would have been gone in MINUTES. The fire had destroyed one corner of the garage and was making it's way up into the rafters. It was all started by an electric cat bed. (Go figure.)

Firemen entering the garage.

My brother-in-law managed to save his wife and kids AND the favorite teddy.

We are all safe and the house is still standing, but I can guarantee that we will all check our smoke alarms the moment we get home. It's made me think more about activities to do with my kids to prepare them for emergencies such as a fire. Here are some ideas I found:

Good material/checklists:

(The following come from befiresmart.com)

1. A fire safety checklist to make sure your child is prepared.

2. A fire hazard checklist to help you and your kids prevent fires.

3. Here's a Burning Questions Quiz.

4. Here's what a fireman looks like. It would also be a great idea to check with your local fire department and see if you can come and meet a fire fighter, dressed in his gear. That would help your little ones not be afraid of them or hide from them if you did have a fire emergency.

Activities/Games:

1. Create your own escape plan. (safekids.org) Practice, practice, practice.

2. Games and info with sparky the dog.

3. Create a relay game. Set up cones and have your kids race while crawling on their hands and knees, just like they would do if there was a fire in the house. Have a cell phone (that is off) at the end where they can pretend to call 911. See more on this idea here.

4. My sister-in-law said that they practiced their escape plan as a game and dressed Dad up as "the fire." If he showed up in the hallway, for example, they had to turn around and find another way out. *She did say that this scared some of the younger kids b/c he tried to be a scary fire, so make sure you prepare them for this game!

5. Three-way Tag involving fire, trees, and water. Click on link for more details.

5. Set a meeting place together and practice racing out to the meeting place. Maybe do this at the end of your fire safety activities and have a treat here so they remember it. My kids seem to always remember things associated with treats.

Books:

If any of you have more ideas, please do share! Always SO good to be prepared.

Toddler Activities: Activity Time with Preschool Lessons

Here's the basic layout of our Activity Time these days, now that I have a preschooler. My two-year old participates in these as well, although I do direct most lessons to my three year old's learning level. One day I'll manage to swing separate activities for both girls (maybe), but for now, this is it:

1. We talk about the day of the week, month, season, and what the weather is like outside. For the songs we sing, click here and here.

2. If there's an upcoming holiday or something special about that month, we discuss those. I've also been incorporating very simple lessons about time.

3. We talk about our letter of the week (for ex, the letter C). We're learning both upper-case and lower-case. I start by writing both letters on our dry-erase board, describing what it looks like and how you write it. Then I invite my toddler/preschooler to come up and trace my letter or write her own--both upper and lower case. Then we sing "The "C" says "kuh", the "C" says "kuh," every letter makes a sound, the "C" says "kuh." We also talk about the sign for this letter.

I fill a paper sack with "C" words and have the girls pull them out one at a time.

4. Then we read our books about the letter that we found at the library (or from our personal library).

4. We do a quick math lesson, usually with fruit. ("If I have three oranges and take away one, how many are left?")

5. Then we end with a craft, activity, or game that has to do with the letter or holiday or whatever else we're learning about! (This is my favorite part). In this example, we covered our letter C's with cotton balls. Then we ate cheese pizza for lunch.

My best advice (to my self included) is to not overwhelm yourself with ALL the information, preschool programs and websites and activities, etc that are out there.
Just have fun with your kids and keep it simple.

Activity Time/Preschool Schedule: How to Plan Time with your Kids

Last fall I enrolled my three year old in a preschool class at an arts academy that included piano and sign language in its curriculum. I was excited for her to get the "classroom experience" and learn from someone other than myself. After a few weeks, I felt disappointed about a few things:

1. After several requests, I was denied a copy of the songs they were teaching in her class (copyright). She was learning some songs I didn't know, so it was impossible to practice them at home.
2. Since I didn't know what my daughter was learning in each class, except for the letter and book of the week, I couldn't reinforce those lessons at home.
3. I didn't know any of the kids in her class or their parents.
4. I just felt plain jealous that someone else was watching my daughter learn new things for the first time. I have to hand her over to a teacher at some point--I'm pretty sure that homeschooling is not for me--but I want to keep her as long as I can. I knew I could handle preschool at home, so I pulled her out and we've incorporated some preschool lessons into our activity time.

I wanted to share my schedule with you because I think it's always helpful to see what other moms are doing. I'd love to hear about your routine as well. Here goes:

Monday: We visit our local children's museum called the Treehouse where they have "Toddler Time" which includes stories and crafts. This replaces activity time at home.

Tuesday: We attend our local library's "Discovery Time." We check out books for the week and play on the computer.

Wednesday: Activity Time/Preschool at home. For more info on this click here.

Thursday: We participate in a local preschool co-op with other mom's in the neighborhood, where five of us rotate teaching. In the fall I'll be joining/creating a Joy School group.

Friday: Activity Time/Preschool at home (review).

That's it. I love doing the co-op preschool because my kids get the social interaction they would at a public preschool, but with kids we know and play with anyway. I also know what the mom's are teaching so I can reinforce those lessons at home. I want to do Joy School in the fall for a more organized curriculum and music.

I think the key is finding what works for you and your kids. I felt so overwhelmed last fall as I considered my options for preschool. Then I realized that we enjoy our activity time at home together and I can prepare her for kindergarten competently. So far, it's working.

Any thoughts on this?