Since it’s officially spring and Easter is right around the corner, we’ve been incorporating that as much as possible into our work this week!
We worked on numbers and counting a lot this week. One of M’s favorite activities was number matching using Easter eggs. I only did this with the numbers 1-10 so as to not overwhelm her. She has played with this countless times throughout the week, both with me and the hubs and on her own. It has been fun watching her come up with new ways to play to… sorting by color or trying to complete it in order, etc.
The best part about using Easter eggs is the possibilities… there are so many great ways to incorporate eggs into your learning and kids have such a blast with them. Last year, M did the same activity but with upper and lower case letters. It is such a great way to reinforce letters and number and also helps with fine motor skills.
M had a lot of fun with crafts this week – there are so many adorable spring crafts out there! She really enjoyed making this lamb, especially since it involved glue and cotton balls 🙂 It has been proudly hanging on our refrigerator representing the arrival of spring. All the supplies needed are probably already in your house!
We also made these cute flower chicks out of empty baby food jars. If you’re interested in making them, check out the tutorial here.
One of my favorite things about holidays is bringing out special holiday books. I try to keep all holiday books away throughout the year, that way they seem new and special each time we get to read them. I took out our entire collection of Easter books (I have no idea how we’ve amassed so many books about Easter eggs!) and have them in a separate pile separate in our playroom. We have had a lot of fun reading through them throughout the week.
Most are lighthearted stories about Easter egg hunts and the getting baskets from the Easter bunny. Even though I feel it’s important for our kids to know that Easter is about much more than that, M is still too young to really understand the concept of death and resurrection so I’ve kept it light. I did find this great book that explains Easter is about Jesus and we’ve been reading it throughout the week. It’s a quick read with nice illustrations and M has been known to ask for it to be read 2-3 times in a row.
What Is Easter? by Michelle Medlock Adams
M and I worked on a bunch of spring and Easter themed worksheets also and like I’ve been doing the past few weeks, I tried to incorporate ones that used new skills. I used a combination of pages from various preschool packs, including Mama’s Monkeys, Ironic Adventures and Royal Baloo.
M worked on a shadow matching activity, which she had a lot of fun with.
She also completed a maze by following the letters of the alphabet in order.
Since we didn’t use Easter eggs to match upper and lower case letters this year, I liked these sheets as they had her practicing doing just that while also working on drawing lines. I can’t help but laugh when her “lines” end up looking like full blown graphics since she likes to start drawing before finding where the match is. (I didn’t get a picture of the completed sheets, will add that in next time!)
One of my favorite activities of the week was graphing (I’ll always be a nerd at heart). M and I worked on this one together and took turns completing the graphs. We counted the number of eggs on each pictures and colored in the corresponding number of boxes on the graph. I’m not sure she would have done this on her own but together she really seemed to enjoy figuring each one out.
A couple of the sheets M did had her working on number sequencing and following directions – both of which are great things for her to be practicing!
I have a couple more Easter themed crafts planned for next week, including making foam Easter eggs and our own maracas (with easter eggs of course). M and I will also be making cookies with some adorable spring cookie cutters I found recently.
Check out these ideas and more for your little learner at 1+1+1=1.
disguised.as.a.supermom 