Welcome to our new 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. After the first week, I am praising God for leading me on a different path, her joy was a beautiful things to see all week!

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

Our first week using Spielgaben has been so much fun! We used set one, the cotton balls, all week and did so many different things with them! She was joyful and engaged with every activity we did!

On the first day, we worked on rainbow color order and made a color train, and also put stickers in our box to help with clean up. These lessons were from the user guides that come with the set.

Also part of the lesson was to add in some color work with clay! I drew a train, and she matched up the balls, and then we made “people” with colored clay.

She had to mix colors to get purple and orange, and she loved that!

I preselected a few worksheets for us to do together based on what I thought she would enjoy. These worksheets come with the set {in PDF format}. I am using our dry erase center so we can reuse or pass down the worksheets. Many are hard on ink, so I didn’t want to just throw them out! We used the materials along with the worksheets to make it more hands on. I love her face here as she was trying to figure out which fruit was missing from the bowl.

She loved the hidden ball activity, another from the user guide, and played it over and over again with me!

I chose a few matching worksheets and we built the items together before doing the matching. Here’s a house…

A butterfly…

A flower…

A cake…

And some free play of course!

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 week we made Foam Dough for the first time. I was inspired by this post. Foam dough is really simple, just some shaving cream and cornstarch all mixed up. She asked for pink food dye, which gave her pink fingers too!

We only made a little bit, but she loved this!

The consistency is similar to cloud dough, but a bit different. She had fun exploring the feel.

As usual, animals had to join the fun!

On the day we used clay with the Spielgaben activity shown earlier, she asked to mix the clay all up and play in the afternoon, so I said yes!

She gave her animals coats.

On a couple of days she chose play dough, her favorite is the vanilla scented white dough with glitter! Again, some animals must have been chilly.

We still have a good batch of water beads, I keep washing them off {I use dish soap and our colander to strain them} and they spring back to life! She wanted some extra water to make a pond, so she had a great time with some tiny frogs, a few rocks and the beads in water.

She played each time for about an hour, which is my focus each day. During the afternoon time while I am working with Pac, is when she is sitting at the dining room table making a mess!

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: popcorn kernels, macaroni noodles, buttons, beans, and gems.

She loved the Doc Mcstuffins matching cards, “oooh I remember these!” she said.

Her sensory box this day was filled with buttons, she was balancing them on her cookie sheet when I peeked in.

The macaroni noodles were a BIG hit.

So were the tiny containers I added to her supply stash. Got these at Dollar Tree a couple of weeks ago.

She wasn’t using some of the puzzles and activities in her boxes and I was curious to know if it was a display thing so I tried something new one day. I put the puzzle out like this and did the first set to see if it might draw her attention.

It did! She came in to get me awhile later to show me she had completed the puzzles!

Same thing happened with the Cars cards! I started them and she ended up finishing them!

The next day I laid a few things out for her, and it worked again. She laced on a few shapes, and then decided to combine toys and matched the bugs up to the colored shapes!

Popcorn kernels were another big hit. She loved the bag of birds too {an old counting toy from a former teacher}.

Automoblox were in one of her boxes this week and she came to show off her car creations to me!

She combined the wheels and the tiny foam blocks {old dollar section Target toy} to make towers.

She ignored the clip cards at first, but when I did the first one for her, she did the rest on her own happily!

See all items that rotate through our boxes here!

All the Rest

She really enjoyed our first Integrity Time lesson {review coming soon} which introduced 4 of our characters and a few songs. A is for Attitude led to a lot of discussion with these 2!

We learned song #1, Who is God?, on Questions with Answers 1: God & Creation, she resisted at first, but I played it during plenty of other times during the week and by the end of the week she was trying to sing along!

She has loads of free play time and chooses what she plays with during those times. She loves to put the pegs on the design boards instead of where they are intended to go!

Foam block tower!

My girl loves all things crawly, and this caterpillar was a big hit. she had never caught one like this before and took very special care of him, for about 24 hours.

She sweetly decided to let him go back and live outside after a day and as we were putting him in the tree, she accidentally placed her knee on him and he died. Green slimy guts everywhere. Poor girl. Poor caterpillar. She handled it well, but was a little freaked out by the guts, they were pretty nasty! It was a good lesson in being super careful around tiny living creatures!

She is loving our very simple daily calendar routine. I decided to keep it SUPER simple this year and just focus on numbers, days, months, etc. She has always mixed up 13 when counting and this has really helped! She loves counting and has finally been correcting her 13 issues! She loves using the swatter to count!