The Good Shepard

This months Experience God monthly pack from Mother Goose Time focused on the story of the good shepard.

Every monthly teacher pack comes with a small lesson plan book, memory verse poster, and a story telling set.  The additional student packs contain the craft materials and take home sheets with pictures to color.

I put the take home sheets in our bin with coloring books and the girls can take them out to color whenever they want.

If you're telling the story of The Good Shepard, you're going to need a sheep headband to act out the story.

Another craft they enjoyed this month was making their own sheep door hangers. 

Tractors

We've been loving this months Mother Goose Time theme, down on the farm.

I read the I Can Read book to Elli.  She used the sight word pointers to find the words on the pages.  She also used the cube cards to match up words.  This is great literacy practise for her.  It's a great way to familiarize her with the shape of words.

For today's inspiration to create Elli was given a tractor picture to look at.  She also got paper, paint, a cardboard tube, and foam.  She put the foam on the tube and pretended it was a tractor tire.  She had fun rolling it in the paint and making tracks.

Elli's favorite thing we did today was playing the game tractor pull.  I put blocks on numbered lines.  I would call out a number and she would pretend to be a tractor collecting the block food and putting it all in a basket.

Dancing on the Farm

In addition to the monthly preschool curriculum we receive from Mother Goose Time, we also get the Dance n' Beats DVD.  

In addition to the DVD you get a book with all the songs written out, the dance moves explained, and extra activities to go with the songs.  We usually just use the DVD.  Mother Goose Time lays out the monthly curriculum so well that I don't feel the need to add more activities from the dance book into our already full day.

Each song from the monthly CD is choreographed with easy to follow dance moves.

We usually do the dancing at the end of the day.  It's easy to just pop the DVD in and let Elli dance while I clean everything up and prep for the next days lesson.

Silos

 Continuing with Mother Goose Time's farm theme, was a day of silos, or as Elli likes to call them, silophones.  The girls played fill up the silo.  They each got a silo card and if they spun the letter C they got to put a piece of corn in it.  We also played this where the had to get the letters H and then B.  This was a good game to practise letter recognition.

For today's invitation to create the girls were given blue and red paper,  a souffle cup, and crayons.  They had a silo picture to look at for inspiration and used the materials to make whatever they wanted.

The girls colored silo pictures to add to their farm murals.

The girls had a lot of fun moving cardboard tubes around on the wall and then dropping corn into them.  The goal was to make a chute that would drop the corn into the pan at the end.  

The girls also played cow emotions.  They took turns rolling the included cube and acting like a cow feeling scared, angry, sad, etc.  

We finished up by reading Big Red Barn.

Barns

We started week 2 with Mother Goose Time's farm theme by learning about barns.  

Every monthly box comes with a brand new puzzle.  

Mother Goose Time had some good ideas that make doing a puzzle more than just putting the pieces where they go.  I numbered the backs of the pieces and then hid them in a bin of paper "grass."  The girls took turns finding the pieces and then worked to put them in number order.  After that they took turns putting their pieces in the puzzle.  

We played a game similar to charades.  The girls took turns rolling the picture cube into the "barn" that we made out of a blanket and chairs.  Then they'd come out and act out the picture while I and whichever child wasn't in the barn guessed what they were .  They thought this was a lot of fun and played it many times.  Addie used the word cards to practice sounding out words, but since Elli can't read, the picture cards were what we used for the game.  

We watched a youtube video of Click, Clack, Moo.

Then the girls traced their feet and turned them into cow heads (Elli asked me to draw hers).  They wrote their own letters to Farmer Brown with things they would want if they were cows.

Cows

We finished up our first week of Mother Goose Time's down on the farm theme by learning about cows.  The girls colored their cow pictures to add to our farm mural.

I read the monthly rhyme time poster to the girls.  We talked about the letter C and the girls put rubber cows, one of this months manipulatives, on all the C's they could find on the poster.  I was surprised that Elli found a few all by herself and was even able to come up with some of her own words that started with C.

We also read the book of the month, which has a matching song on the monthly CD.  The girls thought it was great being able to sing the words in a book.

They got more literacy work by completing the letter C page in their my little journals.  They stamped the letter C on their pages using half of a cardboard tube.

The girls made their own cow masks using the included materials.  

We talked about how cows can walk upstairs but not downstairs.  The girls built fences for the rubber cows from this months box.  They added ramps for them to get in and out, since they can't use stairs.

The girls loved "milking" a rubber glove.  I poked holes in the fingers and filled it with water and this provided lots of entertainment for them.  It was suggested to try filling the glove with paint, but the water was messy enough.