St. Patrick's Day Week in a Glance - M is 36 Months & R is 15 Months

What a busy week!  My hubby, who is a teacher, was off for Spring Break this week so I was able to spend a little extra time printing, laminating, and planning than usual.  We squeezed tons of fun St. Patrick's day themed activities in!

Preschool Skills
Shamrock Size Sorting from Oopsey Daisy.

We did the Leprechaun Race Game, size sorting, patterns, and counting cards from Musings of Me.

Shamrock File Folder Game

Lucky Charms Marshmallow Graphing - I can't find the link to the graph that I used, but 2 Teaching Mommies has a great one that I had intended to use but then couldn't find for some reason.  Can I mention how hilarious this was for me?  My kids don't eat cereal often (they are egg lovers), and when they do it is something simple like Cheerios.  Cereal with colors are pretty much outlawed in this house, so M was AMAZED at the Lucky Charms and could NOT concentrate on the activity.  She was so busy trying to stuff those marshmallows in her mouth!  Lucky for her, I'm not evil and I let her eat the ones we were working with when we were finished.

Shamrock Slap - I basically printed off a set of letters and numbers up to 20.  M didn't really "get" the shamrock part of the game but we used the cards to practice beginning letter sounds (she's already an ace at identifying both upper and lowercase letters) and to work on numbers 10-20 (she can count to 100 with a little help, but she isn't very good at recognizing numbers past 10).

Activities
St. Patrick's Day Memory - I printed and laminated a double set of 9 St. Patrick's Day themed images.  I put one set out upside down, and one set to the side and she matched them all up.

Motor Skills
M colored a St. Patrick's day themed coloring page.  I consider this motor skills because she's not fantastic at it (due to lack of practived admitedly) and she has a weird grip.

Shamrock lacing card

Messy Play
M enjoyed playing with green playdough.

Field Trip
We went to the zoo with some friends and the kids had a great time looking at all the animals.

We also did quite a few fun activities during our St. Patrick's Day Family Night.

That's all for this week!  Next week we will be doing a Healthy Bodies unit, so stay tuned for that!

We'll be linking up to Preschool Corner as well as Tot School.  Visit their websites to find some more great learning activities!

Shamrock File Folder Game

I saw a few cute craft ideas for making shamrocks out of hearts, so I came up with the idea for this file folder game.  It was fun to put together and a good, simple matching practice for M.  I tried to use a few papers that were fairly similar to see if I could stump her, but it didn't work.

Shamrock File Folder Game

Theme: Preschool Skills

Materials: File, heart punch/or cartridge for Cricut (I used George & Basic Shapes), various shades and patterns of green scrap paper

How to: I pulled out my handy dandy Cricut earlier this week and cut 4 hearts out of several different shades and patterns of scrap paper.  You could easily do the same with a heart punch or even just cutting hearts freehand.  Then shape 3 of the hearts into a clover on the inside of the file, leaving room for a 4th leaf.  Glue down and place the 4th leaf of each shamrock into a baggie or envelope pocket that has been glued to the file.  Your child will simply match the leaves to the correct shamrocks!

St. Patrick's Day Family Night

We had a fun St. Patrick's Day Family Night tonight.  I had the best time finding all this fun stuff to do!
Dinner
For dinner we ate Irish Chicken Wings, Colcannon, and green peas. 

For dessert we turned on some Irish music on Pandora and made some Magic Leprechaun Dust!  The kids had such a fun time dancing and shaking up a storm!

Books
We read a few St. Patrick themed books.

St. Patrick's Day by Elaine Landau - A nonfiction.  It was a little advanced for Michaela so I skimmed through it beforehand and summarized the important information as I was "reading" it to her.  I basically just wanted her to know what St. Patrick's day is all about, and the symbols like green, shamrocks, leprechauns, etc.

A Fine St. Patrick's Day by Susan Wojchiechowski - A cute story about two neighboring towns that always compete with each other to decorate their town the best for St. Patrick's Day.  The perpetually losing town finally comes up with a winning idea only to have a stranger in need take them away from their preparations the night before the important day.  I thought there was an awesome moral in this story and really enjoyed reading it to M.

St. Patrick's Day in the Morning by Eve Bunting - A boy is told he is to young to participate in the St. Patrick's Day parade with his father and older brothers so he sets out early in the morning to prove he can make the long walk.  This was a tiny bit long-winded in some places, but still a fun read.

Videos
This was such an awesome video!  I believe it is a Veggie Tales clip.  It was funny and simple and helped M to understand who St. Patrick was historically and why we celebrate St. Patrick's Day.  Enjoy!


Activity
We had a leprechaun hunt using this great printable.  At the end of the hunt was a pot of gold!  (The gold was Rolo's candy).

That's all!  I had wanted to do a craft but bedtime snuck up on us with the time change!  Oh well, Daddy is home this week for Spring Break so we'll have plenty of help to have a fun week full of St. Patrick's Day themed activities.

Lent Week In a Glance - M is 36 Months & R is 15 months

For Mardi Gras we enjoyed a delicious dinner of Red Beans & Rice. 

We played this fun Kings Cake Board Game from DLTK.  I used some lids to the baby food squeeze pouches as our game markers.

We set up a few activities that we will follow for the rest of Lent.  The first is our Jesus Tree.  It is similar to the Advent Jesse Tree that we set up back in November, except we are using all New Testament stories.  Every day we read the story of the day from our children's bible and then M get's to put that day's ornament on the tree.  I am making the ornaments myself and will post the file soon in case anyone is interested.

In the middle of our Jesus Tree is a cross (purple which is the season's liturgical color) with the three major things we are asked to do during lent - pray, fast, and give.  We sat down together as a family on the night before lent began (Mardi Gras) and came up with ways to each of them and wrote those down.

Under the cross is our Lent Calender (which we found here).  Each day M puts a sticker on the current day to countdown to Easter.  This is a similar idea to an Advent Calender counting down to Christmas.

We also have a Sacrifice Jar set up on the entryway table.  It is a little jar with a bowl of lentils next to it.  Every time M is really good, or gives up doing something she wants to do for something I've asked her to do she gets to put a handful of the lentils in the jar.  On Easter Sunday the lentils will be traded out for something really awesome like jellybeans or whatever else I can come up with. :)

We established the similarities between Lent and the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar - which was inspired by this Preschool Lent Lesson Plan.  Basically it is based off of the idea that Lent is all about our attempt to change, just like the caterpillar changes into a butterfly.

We don't have the book and I forgot to stop by the library so I found this neat video on YouTube.  It won't let me embed it, but it is a really great video version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  M liked it so much she watched it a bajillion times.

We didn't do too many TVHC activities but we will be doing a few more throughout Lent.

That's it!  We'll continue with our countdowns to Easter, but this next week we will also be doing an awesome St. Patrick's Day theme for the week!

We'll be linking up to Preschool Corner as well as Tot School.  Visit their websites to find some more great learning activities!

Princess Week in a Glance - M is 36 months & R is 15 months

M turned 3 this week (THREE!) so in honor of her birthday we did a laid back Princess theme week.

After we watched Cinderella, I set out some old shoes for her and she had to find the matching shoe to complete the pair.

We read her Princess Seek & Find book.  We also used this book to find colors & shapes and to practice counting.

We played a Princess matching game using a cheap Disney Princess Old Maid game.

We took a fun field trip to the zoo - not exactly princess related, but it's become a birthday tradition for her.

And of course we ended the week with an AWESOME princess themed birthday tea party for a few of her best girlfriends.

M also was playing around with her wands when she said "Mama, I made an I!" What a smart girl!

We read a few fun princess books.



I had so many ideas for this week, but we mostly ended up taking it easy and watching WAY too many Disney movies.  Next year I'll have to expand this theme a bit. :)