Preschool Mommy

This is a project to help improve the children's motor skills (cutting , folding , gluing, and stapling), but even more so, it is meant as a literacy activity. Through this project the children created their own books with pictures, and told stories to accompany the images. This is a tall order for three year olds, but the children proved once again that they are capable of doing amazing things with just a little bit of scaffolding.

My kids are still in the early stages of representational drawing, and I really wanted to work on their cutting skills, so I made this animal sheet. It has a number of animals for them to choose from, they just have to follow the lines with the scissors to cut them out. I made it this way because they have a tendency to snip around the edge of the page, and I wanted them to start cutting through the paper.

Click here to download the animal cutting sheet

All of the images were downloaded for free online.*

Next, I helped the children fold two pices of paper and staple them on the fold to create a book. They pasted the cut-out images, one to each page, in the book. I placed wax paper between the pages to keep them from sticking together. Once the glue was dried, the children could color the images.

Finally, I asked the children to name their books and tell me stories based on the pictures that were inside. I was very impressed with their stories, and wrote them on the inside of their books. Here is an example of one of the the books.

The child wrote:
Cow is moo.
Duck is quacking, and dog is ruffing.
And the elephant is swinging his trunk, and the seal is going in the water.



There is another story one of the children wrote:
My giraffe reaches out his neck and get leaves,
and my seal swims.
My snake does climb to trees and he goes like this on the ground (acted out :) )
Doggie licks and we pet him.
My turtle's my friend too.

I had another one who sang all of Old Mac Donald, and another who named her snake lion and her gorilla princess, and said they liked to play games on the computer. :)

All of them were original and soo cute. This activity is definitely a keeper.

One caveat....
I gave myself 2 days for this project, but it took much longer. I still haven't gotten all of the children to dictate stories to go along with their books, but most have. I would reccomend that you give youself a couple weeks to work on this while doing smaller daily activies.

*Web sites

• http://animalspiictures.blogspot.com/2010/08/animal-coloring-pages.html
• http://www.coloringpagestube.com/
• http://www.craftsandcoloringpages.com/free-printable-coloring/
• http://www.911coloringpagestoprint.com/
• http://www.coloringpageskingdom.co
• http://animalspiictures.blogspot.com/2010/08/animal-coloring-pages.html
• http://www.kidsandcolors.com/coloring-page-44.html
• http://thecoloringspot.com/animals/animals-set-9.html
• http://www.eprintablecoloringpages.com
• http://www.kidsandcolors.com/
• http://www.tiptopglobe.com/f
• http://www.coloringpages1001.com/coloring-pages/giraffe/

This is a neat activity we do pretty-much every day for circle. What makes it so great is that it accomplishes so much in such and easy, fun way.

Here is what you do:

• Make some flash cards with simple action words written on them in bold print. (Large index cards should be fine). Some ideas for words are: jog, jump, hop, wave, twist, freeze, spin, kick, wiggle, tip-toe, crawl, and clap.
  
• Have your students stand up during circle, making sure they have a bit of room so they aren't hitting each other.
  
• You hold up the first word and say the word ( jump). Then, count together from 1-10 as you perform that action.
• Next, you hold up another word and say the word (spin). Then, count together from 10-20 as you perform that action.
  
• You continue holding up a new card and saying that word every tenth place until you count to 50. The goal is to eventually work your way up to 100, and be able to hold up the cards with out saying the words. Right now we're counting to 50, but I hope we will eventually work our way up to 100.

This activity is great for three reasons:

1. It helps the children learn the sequence of numbers from 1-50 and eventually 1-100. Of course, this is rote knowledge, but it is a necessary step in learning how to count.
2. In the morning some children are pumped and need to get their energy out, and others are still half asleep. This exercise wakes up the sleepy ones, and mellows the hyped up ones.
3. By using the word cards you are helping the children connect the letters with the words, the words with actions, and eventually (hopefully) teaching them some sight words.

This is a neat way to get kids writing and spelling. It started out with Sebastian writing little notes to his sister telling her not to touch the TV, stove etc. (She's only 1 1/2 and obviously can't read, but we didn't mention that :) )All we did was take 2''X3'' index cards and write labels on them for items around the house, then attached them to the items with tape. He already knew his letter sounds pretty well so this was a fun way of working on more complex phonics.


Through this activity we reviewed:

1. The "oo" sound in book
2. The "ll" sound in wall
3. The "sh" sound as in trash
4. The "ch" sound in chair
5. The "ck" sound in clock
6. The "st" sound in stove
7. And the silent "e" in gate.


It was so fun, he had no idea he was learning. ;)

My son, Sebastian, has been really into making up stories lately so I thought we should try to take it to the next level. We've been working together writing little books. Sebastian dictates the story (with a little support from me) I write it out for him in book form, then he draws pictures to go along with each page of the book. It's been a lot of fun, and I am really amazed by what he can do. Here are the two books he's written so far. They are so cute, I just had to share.

Joey-o Got Lost
There was a boy named Joey-o
Joey-o got lost in a big cave in the woods.
Rocks fell down and covered the opening to the cave. It was really dark and Joey-o was very scared.
Then a big, friendly gorilla punched a hole in the top of the cave to let Joey-o out.
He saw the bright lights, and heard the loud engine, of the help helicopter going super-fast.
The help helicopter lowered the hook into the cave.
Joey-o grabbed onto the hook and it pulled him out of the cave.
And the help helicopter flew him back home.

Marley the Space Alien
Marley was from Saturn. He wanted to look at the stars so he shot a flying telescope up into the sky.
The telescope got really old and started falling out of space.
Marley got into a rocket, and shot out into space toward Jupiter to stop the telescope from falling.
But he wasn't fast enough and he telescope fell onto Jupiter.
It crashed into a house and broke.
Then Marley got into a better rocket, went to Jupiter, got the telescope, and took it home.