January 2016 Preschool

This winter my main focus is the Fruit of the Spirit. We are highlighting what I'm calling the "3-year-old necessities": Love, Patience, Kindness, Gentleness, and Self-Control. I created a "Fruit of the Spirit Jar" and when I see her showing the Fruit, I bringing it her attention, say thank-you, etc. and then she gets to put a pom pom in the jar. When the jar is filled, she gets to pick out a candy. [I totally realize this isn't the main end goal is showing the Fruit of the Spirit, but it's the best I could come up with for a toddler -- I do welcome any ideas].

Coloring a fruit of the spirit sheet with her verse we are working on. 

exciting about her pom poms. I honestly thought long and hard about the size of the jar to use. I wanted it to be large enough that she had to work to fill it; but didn't want it to be too hard for her to fill. 

Here she is using her foam stickers to spell "Love" - with her first pom pom in her jar. 

Picking out her first treat - bananas. Haha, she only ever picks bananas. [Ironically, we snuck runts into the labor suite with us when he had Ella, and just the smell of the bananas made me sick].

 The first fruit we are working on is "Love". Here are some of our activities:

proud of her "Love" 

I know it's silly but I really love seeing her coloring progress. Although the orange, colored a terrifying black, isn't great - she shows great focus sometimes, and the leaves on the fruit and the grapes she did really well with. 

Playing with playdough, because it's a new favorite. And we actually had a little cherry mold -- we are using cherries as our fruit to symbolize Love. 

I forgot to get a better picture - but here are the girls in their cherry shirts, for Love! 

Fruit "matching" - the inside of the fruit with the outside. 

using stickers to make cherries. 

I cut a carrot in half in used it to stamp more cherries. 

This was the beginning of us working on writing our letters -- I helped her with these. 

stamping - oh heaven be still this girl loves stamps. 

Other general school activities:

A laminated shape tracing book I got at goodwill for 50 cents. 

paintings. 

Animal matching puzzles. 

A numbered puzzle - yeah for Target dollar spot!

Using clothes pins to select the starting letter of various words. Ella did great, and actually got them all right the  first time, too made I already took the time to laminate them. 

habitat and animal matching

A color and shape spinning wheel. She enjoyed the spinner functionality and then she ran around selecting items from her toys that matched the selected shapes. I loved the star flower, rectangle bacon, and triangle grapes. I just never would have picked those items for those shapes. I love the way she thinks about things.