After a short week during Labor Day Week, we jumped back into our God’s Little Explorers preschool learning about the Letter Z using the Bible story of Noah and his ark full of animals, many of which are also found at zoos today.
Li’l Bit’s favorite activity of the whole week was making her very own salt try for practicing writing and exercising those little finger muscles with a tactile activity! First, she painted a rainbow on a piece of cardboard. I didn’t tell her what order to put the colors, so I was impressed that she followed the ROYGBIV color order! Of course, we reviewed color names. She knows them all except she gets pink and purple mixed up sometimes.
She was very proud of her finished box and could hardly wait for the paint to dry so we could pour in the salt! She used the salt box all week to practice writing CVC words, her name and just letters as I called them out or sounded out words with those letters as the beginning sound. For the actual box, we used a box I had saved from food packaging. It is quite deep, which helps with mess control, but it isn’t too deep for her to write in the salt.
I had hoped to make a trip to the zoo as part of our Letter Z week, but with therapies and tutorials and such it just wasn’t possible. We will make this trip one day soon as fall temperatures are in the air and it will be the perfect time to spend a day at the zoo! It will be a nice surprise for our three littles! In the meantime, Li’l Bit had fun with our Little People Noah’s Ark set!
Before leaving the painting table, Li’l Bit wanted to paint a little more as I read the story of Noah’s Ark from our Read and Learn Bible. I really like her masterpiece!
One of the things I love about the God’s Little Explorers curriculum is that Stacie gives you plenty of ideas to choose from for activities that tie into the letter for the week. I knew Li’l Bit would love to make animal puppets with paper plates and scraps of paper. This is a great fine-motor activity as well since the child is tearing paper, using liquid glue and dealing with small items such as scraps of paper, goggly eyes, yarn and paint!
Li’l Bit painted the plate for her lion puppet and then added embellishments. Since I didn’t have anymore orange craft paint (note to self: need more craft paint when it goes on sale), I gave her a sheet of bright orange copy paper to tear apart for tiger’s body and then black paint for making the stripes.
She wanted to add the yarn whiskers and mouths all on her own, and I gave her goggly eyes to glue on them as well! She has loved playing with her puppets holding them by the little craft sticks (note to self: need more jumbo craft sticks too!).
Math isn’t Li’l Bit’s favorite activity and this year I certainly don’t expect her to “do” math, but I always put at least one number sense activity in her six work bins in her cabinet. To tie in with Noah and the rainbow God gave him, I pulled out our Numbers 1-10 resource pack and we played the game several times.
She also sorted the cards by number after I gave her either the 1-5 cards or the 6-10 cards. I do take out the number word card, because she isn’t’ reading and the card frustrates her (and that isn’t fun!).
While we weren’t able to make it to the zoo, we did make it for a quick lunch play date at our dear friend’s farm, and Li’l Bit got to ride a miniature horse named Sugar bareback! She had a grand time riding around Miss H’s yard on Sugar and hearing the sounds a miniature horse makes! It was definitely the highlight to her week, not to mention seeing Sugar’s human owners Little Miss H and Little Miss G!
