A simple recipe for amazing preschool success with your little ones

What does it take to make an outstanding recipe - whether the traditional kind for food, or a recipe for something much less tangible, like success?

I would argue that all recipes need ingredients, and better ingredients will usually yield better results. Of course, there has to be a method for putting those ingredients together, and surely almost every recipe needs to be carefully seasoned. 

 

My ingredients for preschool - beside the obvious preschoolers and adult carer - would have to start with books and music!  So it was this last week, when we focused on learning the letter J.

One of the wonderful things about children is their energy, and rather than fight it, I figured we'd expend some of it by dancing and singing. We exercised to 100 with Jack Hartman's Count to 100, and did the Tooty Ta with Dr. Jean - because no kid can resist sticking out their tongue and bottom while they dance (who can)?! We sang Hello My Name Is Joe, adding actions until we could barely stand, and worked on vocal modulation sang loudly and quietly with John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt while jingling our bells. Were the kids worn out? NO! Were the teachers? Yes, yes we were, but it was only 9:30 am so we kept going.

Do you see the huge pile of jewelry in the box shown above? We put it ALL on and JUMPED JOYFULLY in jewelry.  By the time we were done the kiddos were ready to sit down for a few books (and my exercise ring was closed for the day)! 

Jump Frog, Jump is a great book for an energetic group - the pages alternate between story line and exclaiming "Jump Frog, Jump!" We held our bodies still on the story pages, just waiting to explode our arms up into the air as we shouted at the frog to JUMP! (Little ones can't still for very long, but by alternating still and moving we're working on self control.)

After our stories were done we worked our fine motor muscles gluing jewels onto a letter j.  I had fine plans for making a jack-o-lantern uppercase J another day, but... some days you follow the recipe, and other days you improvise. It's all good!

This week we'll be focusing on letter K.  My music playlist includes Katalina Matalina, Old King Cole, Kookaburra, and Polly Put the Kettle On.  We'll be reading about kangaroos and koalas, making a letter K craft with a kangaroo and song, and crafting adorable koala headbands.

K is also for kittens, kisses and Kente Cloth, and we'll read about them all. We'll reach into my letter K box to find a king, keys, koala, KitKat and chocolate kisses. I have a karate outfit that the kiddos will take turns wearing, and we'll look for chocolate kisses hidden in the toy kitchen. In case that isn't enough, I'm super excited to have downloaded all the alphabet songs from HeidiSongs, so we'll be singing and dancing lots of letters!

If we go back to the recipe metaphor, I'll finish by adding a helping dollop of outside time and free play, and seasoning liberally with joy and love.  I'm pretty sure our recipe is going to be amazing!

Activities That Will Make Your Kids Jump for Joy

Are your children ready to jump for joy for letter Jj?  Let's see if we can wear them out with lots of fun learning activities!

 

I try to make sure our letter Jj learning happens in late October - because this is prime jack-o-lantern time, and we all love Halloween fun!  Here are some of the ways I've used jack-o-lanterns over the years to keep my preschool and kindergarten kiddos learning:

-Make an event out of your jack-o-lantern experience - it doesn't have to be just a quick pumpkin carving activity.  I like to start a couple of weeks before Halloween with a trip to our favorite pumpkin patch to check out all the "gourd-geous" pumpkins during letter Gg week.

Did you know pumpkins aren't all orange?  Sure, that's what we traditionally see in the grocery store every fall, but the children are always fascinated by all the different sizes, shapes and colors (and later flavors) of pumpkins. I always get a lovely variety for a display, and once Halloween is over I cook them all up for pumpkin muffins and pies... read all about that here and here.

 

We bring math into our jack-o-lantern experience by having the children suggest shapes for Jack's features, then voting for each feature, and tallying their responses.  

I do the cutting, but everyone takes turns to come up and help pull out the "guts".  You can call it fibrous strands if you want, but my kiddos LOVE that I call it guts - ewwwww!

Of course we have to pose with Jack - and leave him on the doorstep.  (See how to keep the learning going through the spring in this post)!

 

We keep the talk about shapes going with a simple felt activity, and the children get to create and recreate jack-o-lanterns all week long.

 We work on patterns with pumpkins (not technically jack-o-lanterns, but while we're on the theme let's get in all the math we can!) with a math center I made. Here it's in a pocket chart, but it works on a desk top too.

 

These math activities include jack-o-lanterns, along with lots of other fun Halloween themes, and we LOVE using the mini erasers from the Target Dollar Spot to complete them!

We mix yellow and red paint to make our orange paintings, and get a fine motor workout cutting and pasting features on our creations.

 

One of our hand print options for J is actually more of a fist painting of jack-o-lanterns (the other choices are jellyfish and jaguars).

 

Are your littles jumping for joy yet?  No?  Try digging out all the jewellery you're willing to let them play with (Mardi Gras beads and plastic jewels are great for this), then turn on some jazz and jump for joy to jazz in your jewellery...

...or head to the zoo and look for animals that jump.

 

Since J is also for jelly, and learning to write our letters is on the agenda, I introduce writing J with a little jelly on a plate.  We start by using our pinky fingers - which is sign language for the letter Jj!  They'll practice a lot when it's a matter of writing the J then licking their fingers, then repeating the process.... yum!

We make our upper case J by adding an orange jack-o-lantern on a green letter J, and cover the lower case j with lots of jewels.

 

What are YOUR favorite activities for letter Jj?  Comment here, or tag me in your social media posts: @paulabeckerman2399 on Instagram, and Paula's Primary Classroom on FaceBook.  I can't wait to see all the fun things you do!

 

More J week activities

It was another busy week here at school!  As you can see, we made our upper case J craft look like jack-o-lanterns.  I had precut orange oval shapes in various sizes, and the children worked on layering them together to get a nice 3D effect - and of course they added faces.  Our jack-o-lanterns were very happy and festive looking!

 We had 3 choices for our letter J hand prints this week: the jack-o-lanterns were made by painting the front of a closed fist, then rolling that on the paper.  This is another idea that I've been using for a long time, and I think it too came from Mailbox Magazine long long ago.

 The jaguars and jellyfish were inspired by some I saw on Pinterest, my number one source of fun ideas!

 We also had lots of costume play this week - of course!  Pretending is a powerful thing, and 3, 4, and 5 year olds definitely yearn to be powerful!  Add lots of candy and staying out late, and you have a pretty awesome holiday!

Just for J

You can tell it's almost Halloween from the songs we are singing, and the activities we're doing.  The Halloween sensory tub from last week is still the hot item of the week, but the book The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything is running a close second.

On Monday, we started the week by putting on lots of jewelry, and jumping for J.

At snack time we had juice and learned how to write the letter j - in jelly!

Today is Tuesday, and we reread Five Little Pumpkins , learned some hand motions for it, and made a craft to follow up.  Super cute!

Of course, the real reason we learn the letter J in October is so we can make a jack-o-lantern!  The kiddos suggest shapes for the facial features, and then vote (we even got to review tallying!)

I do the cutting, since small children and sharp implements is not my favorite combination.  They're always fascinated when the "guts" appear!

Everyone takes a turn to grab a handful of pumpkin guts, and to scoop it out into a bowl.

Not everyone is enthusiastic about the process!  There is also a good run on handwashing - which is why we worked on this before and during snack time. 

I drew on the facial features, and started cutting...

... while the children had snack: fresh pumpkin muffins, made with a pumpkin they helped me to buy (see this previous post) , and that I baked over the weekend.

When I baked the pumpkin, I also saved and roasted the seeds.  One of the children asked about eating pumpkin seeds, a little incredulously, as the seeds she could see were in fresh pumpkin guts!  I explained how to make them, and we warmed and crisped the (already toasted) seeds.  You can see they were also received with different levels of enthusiasm!

This child liked them - he said they tasted like salty popcorn, and I think he's right.  They were good!

Here's our jack-o-lantern! 

Next time I'll tell you about our letter crafts, and some of the other fun learning activities we are enjoying!

Reviewing H - J

This week we are still reviewing letters, while also enjoying spring.  We did two hippo art activities one day, painting plaster hippos, and making paper ones too.  They are both very cute, and worked our fine motor skills.

 

I found the inspiration for the paper hippo here, and modified it to be made with construction paper instead of paper plates.  The children loved it.

There are plenty of good hippo books to read to introduce these crafts.  We really love The Hiccupotomus by Aaron Zenz, and Hiccup by Mercer Mayer.

For the letter I, I considered sampling ice cream again, but decided my friends were already excited enough by our ice cream pretend play.  I've saved a couple of empty ice cream containers, bowls and spoons, and put those out with colorful pompons, what a hit!  I really like that the pompons are easy to pick up once they're done playing, but must admit, they do seem to get spread about a lot!

We also improvised a snow cone shop for the letter i - I'm thinking icy snow.  The cash register was very popular, more than the foam balls, bowls, and empty snowcone syrup bottles we had out for our pretending.  It was interesting to observe the children using the cash register, and to see how they used numbers in their play.  They asked their "customers" for their phone numbers to enter on the register, as well as entering prices, swiping credit and debit cards, and using the scanner on bar codes.

For the letter J we reviewed a fun Spanish language song on youtube.com : Jugo de Naranja.  I made a book from the lyrics a long time ago, and we like to sing the song as we turn the pages.  It's a good review of some basic Spanish vocabulary: me gusta, no me gusta, and lots of food words.

After we sang along with the song, and read the book, I offered each child some orange juice.  "Te gusta jugo de naranja?" I asked each child in turn.  "Si, me gusta jugo de naranja," they answered, and then got some to drink.

We read a book that featured a jellyfish while we drank our jugo de naranja (o.j.) and then made a jelly fish art project, which I found here, and did a jelly fish finger play, which is from here.

This was a particularly busy morning, as we also got to practice our hand writing - on a plate of jelly!  Each child got a plate with a smear of strawberry jelly on it, and practiced forming the letter in the jelly.  Correctly made j's resulted in a tasty lick of their fingers.  Yes, we washed hands before as well as after!  This was literally a sticky proposition, and well loved. 

For any readers who have school aged kiddos, this is also a great way to get them to practice writing their spelling words.  When I taught first grade, I suggested that parents make one evening's spelling practice be writing words in something yummy: jelly, chocolate syrup, peanut butter... I'm sure your children would love to suggest other tasty treats.  No licking fingers until you can write the word or letter correctly - talk about motivating!  Yum!