Preschool Corner ~ Rainbows and Leprechauns

Notice a difference in the button to the left? Preschool Corner is expanding a little bit to incorporate 5K {or Kindergarten} too! You can read a little more about it in the post I wrote yesterday {and grab the new button too if you would like!}.

Starting this week, I'll be sharing what we've been doing with BOTH of our boys. I'm focusing on one theme each week with them, but will be showing how we cover the same theme with activities geared for different ages or modified so they both can participate.

This week’s fun {a.k.a. learning} was all about leprechauns and rainbows. We had to have a little fun with St. Patrick’s Day! A lot of the activities we did eventually ended up in our Rainbow Lapbooks.

Bible

Rainbows = Noah. I’m sure that’s not any big surprise! We read the story of Noah from several of our kid’s Bibles each morning, played with our Noah’s Ark set and used this mini-reader as story sequencing cards for Zachary.

We also have some great flannel board punch out pieces that we used on our flannel board to have Kaleb play out the story of Noah this week.

Coloring

Drawing rainbows ~ Kaleb doesn’t often like to sit down and try to draw on his own. This week I asked him to make a rainbow…and he did!! Granted it only ended up with three colors before he hit his drawing limit, but he even tried to make little arches just like a rainbow.

Dot Rainbows ~ Originally we were going to use our dot markers to make rainbows {til Mommy discovered that she had purchased the wrong set of markers…}, so instead we used this M&M Sorting mat for to Kaleb practice coloring in small circles.

Cooking ~ Pistachio Pudding

We were going to make pistachio muffins, but time ran out ~ so pudding it was! Really, the boys could have cared less ~ it was edible. And green.

Fun

The rice box got pulled out this week and a little leprechaun lost a bunch of his gold. The boys had fun digging around and filling up their bowls with the gold {spray painted kidney beans}.

Math

Counting 1 to 10 ~ We used the same set of cards for the boys, but both did something different. Kaleb is counting from 1 to 10, so we worked on counting with 1:1 correspondence and pointing to the numbers as we said them to help him identify the numbers.

Zachary took the same cards and used them to count backwards from from 10 to 1. We printed off the rainbow numbers from Erica’s site ~ I just printed them off four to a sheet, rather than on individual pages.

Rainbow Size Sorting ~ Kaleb started sorting the rainbows by size and then lost interest.

Big sister Laurianna quickly stepped in and had him stomp on the biggest rainbow that was left in the pile to help him finish sorting them. He thought that was hilarious!

Cereal Sorting/Graphing ~ I had all the pages printed off, the Lucky Charms cereal ready to be sorted ~ and then two little boys snuck into the kitchen and ATE THE ENTIRE PROJECT. So much for our Lucky Charm sorting activity.

Roll a Rainbow ~ A fun number recognition activity where you roll the die to get pieces and build your rainbow. We ended up gluing ours onto Zachary’s lapbook.

Rainbow Graphing ~ These were meant to be large printables, but I just changed the print settings and printed off 2 sheets per page so that we could add it to our lapbook. Zachary had to count the rainbows and then graph how many there were on a bar graph. This was the first time he’d really done graphing and he was so proud of himself! :)

Roll a Leprechaun ~ I thought this might be a little hard for Zachary, but he was so excited to play this. Basically Zachary had to figure out the number on the die that he had rolled and then draw a specific part of the leprechaun. He was so happy with his {girl} leprechaun that he wanted her put on the front of his lapbook.

Phonics & Spelling

Zachary had fun playing this great shamrock phonics sorting game. He read each of the words and then put them into the word family they belonged.

We also worked a little more on All About Spelling {Level 1}. While it may not seem rainbow related, we tied it in by using some rainbow colored M&M’s as rewards for Zachary’s spelling work. When he finished the lesson he made a rainbow row and gobbled them up. :)

Science

Color Mixing ~ Even though we’ve done this before, it never ceases to interest and amaze all of our kids. We just used water and food coloring in small plastic bowls.

We first read the book White Rabbits Color Book and then set up our three primary colors {red, yellow, blue}. I filled those containers up with more water and left three empty ones. The containers were each on a foam sheet that represented the color in the bowl {none under the ones that weren’t filled yet!!}.

The boys each guessed which color would result when we mixed the two choices together and then Kaleb put down the right color square for our new color to go on. We put our colors in a circle shape, similar to the color wheel that we added to our lapbooks.

Color Words ~ We named and wrote the colors in this minit book for our lapbook. Kaleb colored in the squares and named the colors {I wrote them} and Zachary wrote in the color names as I spelled them for him.

Songs and Rhymes

Color Songs ~ Carisa has some great printables for color songs that we sang this week and then added to our lapbook.

I’m a Little Leprechaun

{Tune: I’m a Little Teapot}

I’m a little leprechaun

Dressed in green

The teeniest man that you have ever seen.

If you can catch me,

So it’s told,

I’ll give you my pot of gold!

Additional Resources

Here are links to some of the great resources we used this week! I’m all about using what is already available is someone has gone through the trouble to put it together and it fits what we need!

R is for Rainbow ~ Erica has some GREAT printables all about rainbows. We used several of them this week. Don’t forget that you can make the printables smaller {i.e. fit more than one on a page} if you are worried about printing off too much.

Rainbow Lapbook ~ printables and links from Carisa @ 1+1+1=1

Little Laplinks {April} ~ Links to some lapbook printables and other sites that have completed rainbow lapbooks

Lucky Charms Graphing ~ sort cereal and graph the results of what’s in your bowl.

Shamrock File Folder Games ~ a variety of different file folder games. Pick one to use with your kiddos!

Roll a Leprechaun ~ Whatever number you roll allows you to draw another piece of your leprechaun.

Rainbow ideas from Making Learning Fun

R is for Rainbow ~ Michelle @ Delightful Learning linked up with her preschool rainbow ideas ~ she has some great ones to share!

Stories & Books We Used

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