Learning with Ladybug ~ age 4 y, 5 m

Welcome to our weekly preschool at home blog feature, Learning with Ladybug! As you probably know, I scrapped our preschool plan and built a new one based around our current needs.

We have a few main preschool categories, you can read the entire plan here, I will break my weekly posts down by category so you can see what she did each week within a certain area. If we have a letter focus, I will do a separate post to make searching easier. I will do the same for any themes we do.

See our entire Home Preschool Plan here!

Spielgaben ~ Play Based Learning

Again, Spielgaben has been lots of fun! I didn’t use the materials too much this week, but we did have fun the couple of times we got them out.

We used the wooden shapes from set 2, sphere, cylinder, and cube. Through play we work on basic attributes and identification. She insisted on having the animals from our Australia Continent Box joining us!

She had fun making matches, using a different set of items and finding the same shapes in that set too!

Finally, we copied patterns…

She used her dry erase center to work on her worksheet, matching the shapes.

FYI ~ I am not being paid at all to continue to share about Spielgaben, I was given the set to review and write one post {this one}. What you will see from here on out is just because we are loving it so much!

Messy Fun

We have always had lots of messy fun but I am making it a more intentional part of our plan. Almost all of my ideas are pinned here on my Sensory play board. I am trying to have one planned messy creation experience per week, even if it just making a new batch of something we’ve already done.

This wee we tried something new, SLIME!

We actually tried two different recipes. They are both all over the web, but I will share the blogs that inspired me. The first recipe uses liquid starch and glue, I followed the example shown here.

Ours turned out a little runny at first and I {by mistake} added more glue. Duh-once we added more liquid starch it got more slime-like and was awesome!

We also made the recipe that uses Borax {yes I know it is a bit controversial, I decided it was ok for our family}. We followed this recipe!

We all liked this one too, it was thicker and didn’t get your hands as messy.

She {and the boys} played with both all week!

All By Myself Preschool Boxes

She spends about an hour in the afternoon playing with her boxes. Usually this hour starts right after lunch, but if she wants to play messy stuff first, I let her. I am basically requiring her to float between her boxes or the messy play table, or if she wants to be difficult, she can take a nap. I sneak in to snap photos, but mostly she plays alone. Sometimes she comes to get me to show me something too.

In her 5 small sensory bins this week: shells, cotton balls, mini erasers, popcorn kernels, rocks

Favorite: popcorn

Somehow I managed to get lots of pictures this week. Here’s a peek into her box play time…

She has ignored the shape sorters for a long time, I was surprised to walk in and see her enjoying them!

Same thing with the color puzzles, all of the sudden they appealed to her!

She ran in to get me and told me this was a museum!

Love the set up I walked in and found, created mainly with the Who Lives Where pieces.

A little force feeding for the horse.

Sorting ping pong balls into matching craft cups

Lacing beads on a pipe cleaner…

Automoblox…

The mini eraser collection…

Favorite items this week: Who Lives Where?, Scrabble Alphabet Soup, and sensory items.

See all items that rotate through our boxes here!

All the Rest

C is for Cooperation! Integrity Time was fun again this week!

We discussed the meaning of cooperation, and sang a few of the fun songs {and danced of course}

For our object lesson, we all cooperated to make a smoothie. I gave each child different ingredients {spinach, banana, pineapple, plain yogurt, coconut milk, avocado, mango juice}and used this to discuss how working together makes things better.

They all LOVED this lesson, and the resulting smoothies! We make smoothies almost daily, but making it into a lesson was fun for them.

We are using Questions with Answers 1: God & Creation as our background music during much of our quiet and play time. She calls it her “Bible verse songs” and is slowly learning the words. Already they have sparked awesome spontaneous discussion, mostly with her asking questions! I am so glad I decided to use this CD for her this year!

We got a new library stash, which always includes Llama Llama books, we don’t own any, I really need to get her the collection for Christmas! We also always grab a stack of Laura Numeroff books {the ones we don’t already own}.