Moving onto our next letter of the week, we are learning all about the letter E. Although we really struggled with our homeschooling in general this week, on both my part and my preschoolers part. Letting our toddler set the pace for this week had actually turned into a great learning week here. Since we were feeling sluggish the first half of our week, we focused on easy tasks that we could do in the comfort of our home (to be more honest in the comfort of our bed, thanks to our dry erase writing board) and it couldn't of worked out better to focus on practicing tracing and writing our letter of the week, the letter E. Being stuck inside also gave us the chance to get a little creative on how we worked to enhance skills we have learned: like using our scissors this week. While we usually have stuck to cutting shapes or different types of lines on paper, this time we tried cutting through play dough. Our preschooler thought it was great and I loved that it helped strengthen his hands for better use of his scissors in general. This could be done with an endless number of objects, different thickness and textures to give your preschoolers a variety of experience.
Once we were finally over our sluggish start to the week and when we caught a gorgeous break in the weather, we took our homeschool area outside with a fun matching game that couldn't be simpler to set up. If you have toddlers in your home then like us, you probably have more plastic Easter eggs leftover then you can count. Since we are all about E's this week, it just made sense to put those leftover plastic eggs to work with a uppercase, lowercase alphabet matching game. I wrote the uppercase letter on the top half of a plastic egg, then wrote the corresponding lowercase letter on the bottom half of a plastic egg. I then left the halves disconnected in a tub for our preschooler to find the matches and put back together, it really was that simple and a complete hit with our son. On a little note, I only did a section of the alphabet this time because I didn't want the lesson to be overwhelming rather than fun.
Not letting the great weather go to waste we took the rest of our learning to one of our friends small farms for some up close learning about where our very own eggs come from. While we have been around chickens plenty of times, I realized I never really talked about the process of eggs. Since our toddlers eat them like they are going out of style it only made sense to incorporate this into our week of E learning. So we visited the chicken coop and got a hands on experience of collecting our very own eggs this time, which was great for what I had in mind for continuing this learning into our kitchen. Something you will learn quickly about our family is that we spend a good amount of time in the kitchen and preschool age is the perfect time to start incorporating some help in kitchen tasks. I also love the idea of Montessori learning and how to be self efficient in everyday tasks that you need to acquire. So, I wanted to take advantage of these very things in our later part of the week by having our preschooler learn how to properly clean the eggs that we had collected earlier. But, we weren't stopping at just that! I wanted him to give him an opportunity to learn how to crack open his own eggs and how we use them in many of the things we cook or bake around our home. Before you say it, I know what you are thinking "Is she crazy? Letting a toddler crack eggs on their own?!" Just give it a try, you may be surprised at how easily a task may come to your preschoolers. This also is a great way to provide some sensory learning with the different textures of the eggs between the shells themselves and the yolks. All you need is two clean bowls, one for shells and one for the actual yolks when they are cracked which makes this an easy weekday lesson.
Here you can see the entire process which was really simple ,but effective. I now have a new egg cracking helper for all our baking needs and our preschooler has a new confidence about a skill he has acquired. It's a win, win in my book! You can take this hands on learning even a step further if you wanted by letting them scramble the eggs or even just squish the different parts of eggs around for a bit. Our toddler asked to use them in making cookies (a very sly request) that I just couldn't turn down, I passed it off as continued learning by including him in each step of the cookie making process. To play off our time in the kitchen with the eggs we moved right into our letter of the week crafts for this week, we made a capital E elephant and a lowercase E eggshell.
We didn't make it to our local library this week ,but luckily we have a pretty good selection of our own children's books to pull from. It only seemed fitting to use our collection of Eric Carle's books as our author of choice for this week. So, here is our family favorite picks for this week:
Since we used this week to dive into all of our favorite Eric Carle books, it only seemed fitting to include an activity to go along with the books. I let our preschooler choose his favorite book and then came up with something to go along in theme with it. His choice happened to be The Tiny Seed, which was perfect because we had recently bought different plant seeds for his personal window garden. We decided to go with a counting game, it's really easy to do. All you need is a sheet of paper, a marker, and some plant seeds (you could even use cut outs of seeds if you'd like). I just roughly drew a flower with ten petals and labeled them 1-10. Our preschooler used a cup of seeds and counted out the appropriate number for each petal. If you'd like you could even take it a step further and use those seeds after the game to plant in miniature containers, let your toddler do all the work. This creates a nice hands on sensory experience while teaching them how plants or even food grows.
We won't be sharing a new bible lesson this week because of last week's bible lesson being split into the first couple days of this week. If you didn't catch that then you can read it
here. We will have a whole new lesson for next week though. And finally to wrap up this week we added our letter E to our very own personal Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree. Check back with us next week for our fun filled week of the letter F! We have an entire week that will be filled with some fun games, a sensory box, new crafts, and even a recipe.
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