Continuing with the letter F.

Picking up where our last post left off, we are continuing our week of learning with the letter F. This week's letter couldn't of had better timing since this month's community helper is firefighters, it was like it was meant to be. You've heard me say it before and you'll hear me say it again: take advantage of all the resources you have in your community, especially the local library! I just cannot emphasize it enough that there are literally thousands of free resources to use at your local library. For example below you will see a learning tub that our library offers (these are similar to the small learning totes I have featured in my blog before).

This specific learning tub is themed all about community helpers and inside it holds numerous books on different community helpers, puzzles, educational DVD, puppets, and hands on learning tools. Since our focus this week is on learning about firefighters we can just use the materials that are relevant to that. We kicked off our day with some light reading on firefighters to get a better idea of what exactly it is that they do. A few books we focused on were:

Using some of the materials from our learning kit and some materials from our own homeschool area, I was able to set up a fire themed sensory box for our preschooler. This gave him the opportunity to discover on his own. Inside were different themed magnets, firefighting puzzle pieces, wooden fire engines, funnels, and small hoses for the rice to go through. This makes for a great quiet time activity or just a nice break between different learning lessons.

To keep in theme with our hands on learning we tied in using a firefighting themed magnet board and a magnetic dress up by Melissa and Doug. Both are simple, hands on learning tools that let your toddler learn through playing.

To break up our day inside we wanted to incorporate a fun learning game that could be played outside, we made small flame letters and filled a small squirtgun for our preschooler. I constructed different flames with different letters, stuck them to our fence, and instructed our son to "put out the fire" on only the flames that had the letter F on them. This simple idea was such a hit with our preschooler that he didn't want it to end!

There are so many more ways you could incorporate fun fire learning into your home whether it be themed snacks, crafts, or if you are lucky even a tour of your local firefighters station (we plan to do this at their next open house). Of course even with all the fun behind learning about our community helper this week, we wanted to make sure to educate our preschooler on fire safety as well. We used the DVD included in our learning kit:

 

This covered a little bit of everything from what firefighters really do for our community to fire safety itself. Which helped us enforce our own emergency preparedness standards to review with our toddler. Check back in very soon to see what we are up to next!