Sorting Sprinkles: Easter for Preschoolers

Yep...Definitely NOT meant to be homeschooling lately. As soon as Adrian finished his anti-viral medication, little Zahavah caught a bug of her own! NO!!! So please bear with me. Posting will be slow and sparse this week and next week as I nurse everyone back to health (and pray no one passes it around) but also because well, no one was feeling up to doing much school-wise.

Cups & Counters - Easter chocolate eggs & Easter "baskets

Using 36 "Dove Dark Chocolate Easter Eggs", Adrian had to distribute the right amount of eggs in the right "basket" (Williams-Sonoma ceramic bunny dish filled with Easter grass). The number cards were made by Jolanthe at Homeschool Creations. Jolanthe makes some of the prettiest printables out there and I often find myself using her number cards! :)

Practical life - Pestle & Mortar Eggshell

We honestly haven't used the pestle and mortar in school since Adrian was a tot but knowing I was planning on using broken eggshell for a craft later, I thought I'd let Adrian smash some eggshell with the pestle just for fun. And how fun it was for him. He loved hearing the crushing sound it made and went at it very slowly per my instructions since we wanted the pieces to stay relatively big for the craft. Prior to the pestling, you'll need washed and then dried eggshells. Don't forget to remove the lining attached to the shell while washing.

Art & Dexterity : Easter chick

Here's the craft using the eggshells but also corn. I'm kind of liking the 3D art right now if you can't tell! :) For the template, I went with one made by Make and Takes. It's a beautiful, simple, yet realistic chick illustration. I told Adrian we'd fill the eggshell with eggshell and the chick with corn using liquid glue. We used brown eggshells so we would see more contrast on our paper but also because it's pretty much all there is to eat around here when you want fresh farm eggs. Looking back on it, I wish we would have done this chick in stretched cotton balls like the one we did earlier because I thought it looked so beautiful but I really wanted to work with small beans or something similar this week to get some small motor exercises in.

Sensorial: Easter Sound Cylinders

Last time I did sound cylinders with Adrian, he was only 3 and we used glass baby food jars I had painted black. I recall him loving the activity and doing it three times in a row for an entire week. For Easter, I thought I'd present a "special edition" of the Montessori sound cylinders after seeing similar ones on Living Montessori Now. I wish my eggs would have been a bit more color coordinated (2 colors only) but that'll have to wait until next year I guess. :) For now, Adrian loved shaking the eggs and matching them by sound. I opened the back row to show you what I put inside. Next time, I'll try to put in Easter-themed objects too! ;)

Language: Matching Picture and Word of Broken Easter Eggs

Adrian is trying to read so I like encouraging it by doing literacy activities. We're kind of stuck at this time. He can sound the letters very well and has been able to do so for a year and a half now but for some reason, he does not want to "link" them up. We've been working on sounding letters one after the other slowly and then faster and faster so he would hear a word out of it but it doesn't seem to work. Instead, it seems to me as if he were memorizing words...lots of words. I'll be doing research on this soon. Anyhow, I prepared construction paper eggs for this activity (pastel colors for Easter), glued Easter-themed pictures on the bottom half and wrote the three letter words on the top. I then cut the eggs in half and presented the activity the next day (how last minute are we, huh?). Adrian knew some of the words so he matched those right away. His method was very disorganized. He didn't try to read the words completely...a "p" immediately meant a "pen" to him and not a "paw" as it should have and so on so I had to intervene and slow him down and remind him how to proceed.

Easter Egg Pictures

Words / Pictures used for our Literacy activity were as follow:

Hat

Paw

Cat

Hen

Mug

Pig

Pen

Rat

Hay

Mat

Prior to starting the matching of the broken eggs, I made sure Adrian knew what the pictures represented so he wouldn't be frustrated. After all, this was an "Easter edition"; the rat did have bunny ears and could have caused confusion! :)

Enjoy and Happy Easter to those of you you celebrate it!

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