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!
{disclaimer: affiliate links are used in this post}
Spielgaben ~ Play Based Learning
We worked with a new set of toys from Spielgaben this week and I was honestly amazed with how much we did with 9 little cube blocks.
Below you can see her experimenting with the blocks all taped together.
She LOVED this! We followed the lesson to lay them all in a line and use tape on one side. We then made different shapes they suggested and then explored freely.
This was our duck…
We used the worksheets I chose for her in our dry erase activity center.
I cannot believe I almost skipped the elephant lesson. Seriously, I thought it was silly and a waste of time. Boy was I wrong. We had so much fun with this and exposed many skills!
The lesson was mostly about creativity but I extended it myself as we got out another Spielgaben set, with the tiny colored circles. We used them as food for the elephant.
We lined up groups of ten and I modeled counting by tens for her as she repeated with me.
Her favorite, when he ate “burnt chicken” and threw up all of his food!
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!
Jim from Spielgaben saw my blog posts and emailed me to say thanks and offer my readers a deal on the pre-orders now being taken! If you contact Jim from Spielgaben, he will give you a discount if you mention my blog! Regular price to pre-order is $405, and my readers can pre-order for $355 {these are AUD prices but the conversion is similar, it actually favors USD right now so your price will be lower than AUD}. Shipping is free. Contact Jim with any questions!
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.
We made homemade Moon Sand!
We used 4 cups of play sand from Home Depot {a huge bag was only $5}, 2 cups of corn starch, and 1 cup of water.
You can adjust the amount of water to get the consistency you like.
During the week we added many things to the moon sand; including small containers, popsicle sticks, small blocks, and animals.
I only took pictures a couple of times but this sand was played with by all three kids SO much! It wasn’t nearly as messy as I had envisioned! I just wiped the table down and vacuumed under the chairs.
To color the sand I tried food coloring at first, and it was OK, but then I saw an idea to crush up colored chalk, so we tried that! It worked much better.
Bad part of this ~ it got moldy within a week. We went out of town for 4 days and came back to find it all yucky. Thankfully the bag of play sand is huge, we’ll just make more!
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.
We haven’t been able to do school on the 5th day recently in the afternoon {when she has her box time} so I only made 4 boxes this week.
In her 4 small sensory bins this week: purple fish rocks, beans, gems, bottle tops
Some days she unpacks her box by herself, other days she asks me to sit with her and open it all.
She was so excited to see the family counters in her box, she LOVES these!
Another favorite is the farm block puzzle, She did different ones every day this week!
Sorting colors {an old toy from my teaching days}
Building with the Interlox…
Favorite items this week: farm puzzle, family counters, Interlox, dice.
See all items that rotate through our boxes here!
All the Rest
After doing tons of reading and research in choosing a cursive handwriting program for Krash, I learned a lot! The program I chose, Logic of English, recommends teaching cursive BEFORE manuscript to young children! Ladybug has always done tracing worksheets but we have never formally worked on handwriting.
My goal with Ladybug {age 4 1/2} is to learn to recognize cursive letters and work through them in the salt box only for now. I created our salt box out of an old Melissa and Doug wooden toy box, I got the idea from this blog.
We are not using pencil and paper or even dry erase yet.
She LOVES this, and asks to learn her cursive! I am introducing a letter a day and reviewing letters we have done. We don’t do this every day, just when I remember!
She really loves free drawing in the new salt box too, and often brings a Squinkie to help!
We bought a new Gappy app since she loves Gappy’s Words so much! We got Gappy’s Mystery Letters and she LOVES it! Here she was coloring the van she earned for her work with the letter V. 
See our LETTER O work here, it was done this same week as what you see above!
Visit Preschool Corner to see more home preschool families!
