Hey Diddle Diddle Stick Puppets

Sharing with you our activities to go along with Hey Diddle Diddle nursery rhyme.  Actually, this is just part of our Before FIAR Goodnight Moon unit study.  We completed this today and my son loved it to bits!  So I might as well share it...

After reading the book for days (until my son can read them independently LOL), I started by collecting images from Google and printed it on a cardstock.  The characters I printed were:  the fiddler cat, dog, moon, jumping cow and the dish with the spoon.  Once ready I had Mavi color them.  I made him choose whatever color he wants.  He was so delighted to color the characters in the nursery!

The dish with the spoon is his favorite.  He tells me that the dish looks like Daddy and the spoon is Mommy. I love it that he associates me and his Dad to two objects holding hands :)

I cut each of the characters. 

Then I made him help me attach each on a popsicle stick using a sticky tape. 

And we started reciting the rhyme using these puppets! Oh aren’t they the cutest?

 

And then here’s another version wherein I made them stand using egg carton box so we can do some theatrics with out puppets. 

For reading comprehension and inference, I have my son answer these questions as we go along with the rhyme:

1. Who jumped over the moon?
2. Why do you think the cow jumped over the moon?
3. What instrument did the cat play
4. What kind of music do you think he was playing?  or What do you think his favorite song was?
5. Who laughed in the rhyme?
6. Why do you think the dog was laughing?
7. Who did the spoon run away with?
8. Why do you think they ran away together?

Some of these questions were really tough especially for a 3 year old, but it was funny to hear his answers.  And would you believe, I end up being asked as well. 

Linking this to:

B4FIAR: Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?

Sharing to you the activities that we had to go along with Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear? unit.  Sorry for the overdue post, we’ve been enjoying the outdoors these days... and that explains the less homeschool activities.

I dressed him in red shirt and blue pants... “Just like Jesse Bear Mommy!” he said.

  

Clipcards from Homeschool Creations.

Learning how to read, write and spell.

Sorting the foods  that Jesse Bear ate.  Surprisingly, he got it all correct.

Completing the pattern.

We use potatoes for stamping and he draw the family of Jesse Bear using oil pastels.

         

We had Bear in 4 Seasons craft.

Sort out clothing according to season.

After our sorting game, he wanted to show me his shoes too... and we arranged it according to season as well (winter, spring, summer and autumn).

Same thing with his coats and jackets LOL.

 

For math, we measure fruits and vegetables.

 

He loves to dress his bear :)

   

It was a fruitful unit.  He keeps on telling me “I love Jesse Bear Mommy, it’s my favorite!”.   And I love that fact that he enjoys the Before FIAR approach, that once in a while he gets to have an in depth knowledge of certain books and exposure to literature. 

B4FIAR: Corduroy by Don Freeman

Our first Before FIAR unit for the year 2012 is Corduroy.  This story has been the focus of our activities since Monday aside from our daily worksheets.  Printables used in the activities below were sourced from:  Homeschool Creations and Homeschool Share.

Learning beginning and ending sounds of objects in the story.  Mavi did very well with his beginning letters ... but still fail to identify some ending sounds.

Sorting objects whether they’re furniture or not.  After this we also roam around the house to identify ‘real life’ furniture.

I introduced for the very first time the concept of less and more using our buttons (we often use these as counters).   It was a good start :)  We’ll be doing more of this as he progress then I can introduce the symbols less than and greater than.

We simply distinguish which is more and less (for now).  We did a couple of rounds and he finally got bored. It didn’t interest him that much.

Another Corduroy math-related activity was counting pennies.  Lisa has to save so she can buy Corduroy and this is exactly what we did here.  We don’t own a piggybank so I just printed this out as well.  This is an addition game, and we used our play money (coins) instead of printing the paper coins that comes with this printable pack. We pretended that I gave him money, and so is his Dad... then he needed to count the total amount of the coins we gave him and see if he can buy his favorite toy from the toy store.

Another math activity was “where’s the button” game.  He arranged the numbers in order for this activity.  I hide the game piece (button) underneath the number and made him guess what number the button is underneath.  I only printed out the ‘teens number so we can practice more of this, since he still gets confused of their names.

 

Patterning activities using printables and buttons.

We painted his favorite toy Thomas the train and asked if he could paint our house :)

Later we painted Corduroy together.

    

We placed the painting inside his room and loves how it resembles the Corduroy in his book.

Linking this to:

Worksheets – Alphabets

Because my printer has finally arrived, I am executing my “worksheets” plan starting this week.  Since almost everything here in Europe is expensive, I decided not to purchases any worksheets for Mavi.  Instead, I collected a bunch of pdf files from the web, printed and compiled some  selections for our daily worksheets.  We will still be doing Montessori activities, but I’d like to add worksheets to prepare Mavi for preschool this September.

Basically, after the circle time we start “schooling” with worksheets.  Then followed by Pink Series or Blue Series (Montessori Reading).  In the afternoon after we took a break, have lunch and did some free play, we would work on either B4FIAR units, themed units, outdoor activities, Geography or any other Montessori related activities. 

Anyway, here’s my worksheets for this week":

There are two categories: 

Monday and Wednesday, we’ll be working with alphabet based worksheets.  One letter for each day, and the letters are randomly selected.

Tuesday and Thursday, we’ll be working with numbers or math activities. 

Friday, we’ll be working with Progressive Phonics booklets and do some art-related activities.

Here are the contents of the alphabet’s worksheet:

• Practice coloring and tracing of a letter. I got it from here.
• Mark the picture that starts with the letter of the day. Here we used our do-a-dot markers and marked each objects starting with letter ‘t’ blue. The worksheet was downloaded from Beginning Reading for free.

         

• Here are additional worksheets which I downloaded from School Sparks.  The activities below is identifying words and picture objects that begins with letter ‘t’.  Here, the child glues the words or letters on the box.  I cut out the letters first and just made my son glue the correct answer.
  

 

• Some auditory exercises from the same source (School Sparks).

• I also added do-a-dot activities, which my son truly enjoyed the most.  This printable was downloaded from Shannon’s Totschool. She has both the uppercase and the lowercase letters.

• Letter maze or letter search.  This also came from Shannon’s Totschool website.

 

Now everything goes well, until my son asked for more letters to work on for his stamping activities.  He ended up doing letters A to J.  To save ink and paper (LOL), we might do the stamping game once a week or I will just make NOT to print extra letters :)

See him in action working the sheets.  Without the stamping of do-a-dots, he can finish the worksheets in about 30 minutes. 

I just hope I am doing this right.  He works these with me... with a little guidance such describing the activity, and giving out the instructions.  In a few weeks, I might still look for additional activities that we could worked in case he would ask for more.  But for now, I’ll settle for this as I am also pre-occupied with work. 

Gingerbread Man

We’ve been reading the story of the Gingerbread Man these days and did a couple of activities to go along with the book.

Making Gingerbread Men(or women).  I made use of our paper bags and cut the gingerbread man pattern by freehand.  Then I made clothes for them using construction papers. I also decided to add some ornaments in case Mavi gets bored of using papers :)

I made each a face and my son was more than happy to dress them up... each one differently.

 

He worked through all the the gingerbread men.  If you look closely, he even added small dots representing buttons on each clothing, “Just like in the book Mama!” he said.

Then we also worked on the story sequencing.  We did this a couple of times, first using the book as a guide.  Then after working and reading the book over and over again he can sequence the printouts without my assistance.  He would even use our Safari Toobs animals to demonstrate the event that happened in the story.  I downloaded this from Homeschool Share.

 

Size sorting of gingerbread babies, got this from Homeschool Creations.