We’ll be working on our Astronaut Preschool unit soon, so I’ll have lots more to go along with the printables, but I just couldn’t wait to share it! We’ll be using the book On the Moon by Anna Milbourne and Benji Davies {a book we read often and love!!}.
Name tag strip for front of lapbook or folder if you store your preschool pack
Story summary sheet for one of your favorite books
Verse printable for Psalm 148:3 ~ Praise Him, sun and moon...
Astronaut words
Shadow matching
Trace the rocket’s path
Rocket ship size sequencing
Letters to spell the word astronaut
Blast Off!! Countdown from 10 to 1
Rocket Colors ~ trace the color word
Find the letter A’s worksheet
Beginning sound word cards
Letter M and R word tracing sheets
“Climb Aboard the Spaceship” song and printable
You can see more pictures and download the pdf file on my Astronaut Preschool Pack page. There are some additional GREAT astronaut printables available from Maureen at Spell Outloud on her website also under ‘A is for Astronaut’.
I’ll be sharing more later this week about our Gingerbread Baby Preschool Pack to go along with the book Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett. I figured that the sooner I could get it to you all, the better! We’ll be putting this all into a lapbook folder, but there are some extra pieces to go along with it too. While we’re using the book by Jan Brett {I love her books!}, much of the Gingerbread Baby Preschool Pack can also go along with other gingerbread men books.
This just came along spur of the moment, so I’m still printing things off and gathering ideas too, but here’s a little peek at some of the 26 pages of printables in the pack. I’m printing many of the pieces off onto cardstock and laminating the worksheets to use again {I love my Scotch laminator}.
Our pirate lapbook ended up being closer to a three week learning time. Kaleb loves pirates.
L.O.V.E.S. them. He has a colonial hat that he loves to wear, a sword constantly stuck in his ‘gunbelt’ and we have read the book On a Pirate Ship more times that I can remember.
With as long as we were doing the unit, you would think that I would have actually managed to get more on my ‘idea list’ covered…but that didn’t happen. :) I’ll share the lapbook here with you all and also all of the ideas that I had ~ and let you know which ones we did manage to get around to! I don’t have as many pictures this go-round…go figure.
The Pirate Unit
I’ll break up the things that we did by topic/subject. We read the book {over and over again} every day and did a few activities from the lapbook each day and also did 3-5 activities from our unit study.
Bible
Verses: The first one we talked about was ‘You shall not steal.’ {an obvious choice, no?}; our main verse was Matthew 6:21 ~ “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Kaleb isn't one to ‘perform’ much, so this was a BIG deal getting him to say his verse on camera. :) I know he sounds like he’s muttering, but really he’s ‘singing’ it like on our Seeds of Purpose cd. {lapbook piece}
Language/Spelling
Vocabulary {words from the book}: enormous, steer, twinkling, clings, glittering, fearless, tricky, adventure
Pirate words: anchor, jewels, treasure, boat, sails, sailor, parrot, map, canon, doubloons {lapbook piece} Hint: print off an extra page to use as a matching game!!
Uppercase/lowercase ABC matching {lapbook piece}
Tell what happened in the story and favorite part of the story {lapbook piece ~ front of lapbook}
Math
How many bags of gold? counting up to 10 {lapbook piece}
Pirate game ~ identifying numbers and moving correct number of spaces {lapbook piece}
Pattern with ‘jewels’ ~ I had planned to buy some fancy jewels to use for this, but we ended up just patterning 1” circles from paper.
Size sequencing ~ we sequenced pirate ships from large to small and small to large {lapbook piece}
Science
Animals ~ We printed off word card pictures of all the animals in the story and put them on a jump ring so we can add more animals from other stories that we read. We also sequenced the animals by the order we saw them in the book.
Direction ~ We had some fake compasses that we used to talk about North / South/ East / West
Weather ~ we talked about storms and calm seas, how you could tell a storm was coming in the book, etc..
Crafts
Make a periscope/telescope. We used toilet paper tubes and paper towel tubes covered with saran wrap on one end and tinfoil all around for ours. HUGE hit.
Write name ~ actually traced it to put on the front of our lapbook {lapbook piece}
Walk the plank ~ we did simple balancing outside along the edge of our playground area. You could also tape a line on the floor and walk the line.
Personal Hygiene
Brushing teeth ~ one look at most pirate’s teeth and you realize the importance of brushing well! :)
Art
Stripes/dots ~ we looked through our book to find all of the stripes on the pages and then all the dots {there are stripes on almost every page}
Fun Stuff
Puppets!! We printed out the puppets from our lapbook kit, stuck them on popsicle sticks and had fun playing with them
Dig for buried treasure!!! A sensory bucket filled with dirt and we had fun digging for gold coins in the dirt.
Other things we wanted to do, but didn’t have time for {based on the book On a Pirate Ship}:
ABC’s: Put a magnet on the end of a pirate hook and ‘fish’ for letters.
Language/Spelling: spell the word ‘pirate’ using other letters {build words using the word cards}
Science: steamy drinks {the pirates are drinking them}, sink the pirate ship {see how many 1” blocks you can put on a foam tray before it sinks}, talk about the the wind {storms at sea, wind blowing curtains on last page}, shadows from how the sun is throughout the book
Crafts: make an ‘ocean’ water bottle
Art: shades of blue {similar to all the shades of the ocean ~ dark to light}, draw a pictures like the one on the last page of On a Pirate Ship
Musical Instruments: the book shows accordians and violins being played
The Pirate Lapbook
The pirate lapbook is a bit of a mix of the unit study and also has standalone pieces. On the front of the lapbook is a tracing/writing activity where Kaleb traced his name {all capital letters}. One of the things that I’ve been focusing on when we read books is having Kaleb tell me what the book was about and what his favorite part. I wrote his ‘summary’ of the book On a Pirate Ship and also his favorite part of the story.
The back cover of the lapbook has a pirate game board taped to it. I laminated each of the pieces and taped them together and to the back of the folder.
Inside the lapbook we glued our mini books {Parrot Colors & Bags of Gold}, added our Bible verse, the pockets for our ABC uppercase/lowercase matching cards and our pirate word cards, and then a big pocket to store our extra stuff {sequencing cards and puppets}. The pocket is just half of a 9x12 envelope.
View all the pieces of the lapbook and download it on the Pirate Lapbook page.
Additional Resources
The verse that was a part of our lapbook was “Where your treasure is there your heart will be also” from Matthew 6:21. It is a part of the Seeds of Purpose cd that we love and listen to often!!
I’ve put together a ‘preschool store’ of sorts through Amazon that shows many of the tools and toys we use during our preschool time ~ and some of our favorite things.
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Our boys enjoyed the fireman lapbook that we did so much and asked to do one about policemen.
And we did!
Both of the boys are very much into firemen and policemen at the moment, so we took advantage of that this week and I put together a policeman lapbook for Zachary and Kaleb. A certain little someone was being a little stubborn during some of it and didn’t want to do it all. Zachary, on the other hand, was able to do most of the cutting for the booklets on his own and then I glued it all together for both of them.
We did other activities as well during the week ~ made a stoplight craft {included in the lapbook file}, made red/yellow/green patterns using paperclips, dressed up like policemen, directed traffic, played with our cars/trucks and read lots of books too {see below}.
This is a picture of the inside/outside and back of our policeman lapbook that we did. I used a blue file folder {of course} ~ no fancy folding, and just punched it with a 3 hole punch when we were done so we could put it into a binder to keep on a nearby shelf.
The front cover is a coloring sheet of a policeman that is part of the full lapbook file. On the back we put the P for Policeman letter tracing sheet that we worked on {included in the lapbook file}.
Inside the Lapbook
~ Count the Fingerprints: 1:1 counting up to 10. I’d highly recommend using a washable ink ~ I’m just saying.
~ Shapes in Signs: A look at signs we see all around us and the shape that they are.
~ What Color is the Police’s Hat? A coloring book to identify color words.
~ Police Patterns: Make simple {or more complex} patterns using a police officer and a magnifying glass.
~ Sign Matching: Play a fun game of memory together with street signs {I recommend printing this one on cardstock}.
~ ABC Matching: Uppercase and lowercase letter matching cards {print on cardstock and laminate to reuse!}.
~ Catch the Robber: A tracing activity to use with your preschooler {I would recommend printing this on cardstock and laminating so you can use it later}.
You can download individual pieces for the police lapbook on my website or the full file {it’s around 2.5 MB}. I have a few additional resources on the website too for you to visit. If you decide to do the lapbook with your kids, let me know and I’ll link to you from my website. :)
Stories & Books We Used
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I was visiting Jill’s site last week and saw her post on the Fruits of the Spirit and immediately started printing off a bunch of stuff to do with all of the kids during the upcoming week…and the kids had so much fun working on their lapbooks and learning about the Fruits of the Spirit.
Since our Awana time is done now, we focused on this as our Bible time and also added in some extra activities to go along with the general fruitiness. :) Before I start linking and show you the fun stuff we did with our lapbook, I have to share a little about Zachary’s handwriting.
Zachary finished up his handwriting curriculum at the end of last week, so I pulled out a new book for him to start using ~ cursive. Can I just say that the boy LOVED it? He’s only worked on the letters ‘i’ and ‘u’ but I’ve found him sitting at the table working on a scratch piece of paper later in the day, practicing his letters.
Note: From Abeka’s K4 cursive booklet.
Other than our daily reading and writing we started talking about the Fruit of the Spirit and putting together our lapbook. We need the Spirit of God to help us with each of the fruits ~ love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
As we matched the questions to their mini-books, I asked Zachary the different questions. For example: “Your brother came into your room and took a toy without asking. How can you show patience?” and we talked about different ways we could show the fruits of the Spirit to others.
Bible Verse Card
Click on the thumbnail image to download.
We needed a verse card for Galatians 5:22-23 to go on our morning board, so I put together one in the same format that we did our Awana verses for the boys {and girls} to practice.
Language
We used the fruit of the Spirit words to count out the syllables in words. Did you realize that there are 3 one-syllable words, 3 two-syllable words, and 3 three-syllable words? Zachary sorted his words and put them into his lapbook by syllable count.
Kaleb just glued his and stuck them wherever they landed {grins}.
Character
To tie into the fruit theme, we used this great idea for Runts candy. I filled a jar with the candy and as I ‘caught’ the kids showing a Fruit of the Spirit throughout the day, I gave them a piece of candy {we found our Runts at the Dollar Tree}.
Since the Runts were such a huge hit, we also used them in some learning activities. I have to admit it was HYSTERICAL watching Kaleb periodically stick his little nose down right next to the candy and sniff, sniff, sniff. Zachary disappeared with a bowl when I got distracted….
Color Sorting & Letters
I gave Kaleb a bowl or Runts and he sorted them by color. After he named the color I repeated the color word back to him asked what letter the word started with. “This is red. What letter does red start with?” made the ‘r’ sound
Counting
Next, we lined them up and counted them, trying our best to count with 1:1 correspondence.
Patterns
We used the fruit to make patterns {orange, green, orange, green ~ ABAB} and moved to more difficult patterns {red, yellow, yellow ~ ABB pattern}.
Estimating & Subtraction
Zachary also worked on patterns, but we focused more on less/more and estimating with his pile of Runts. He had to guess which one he had more of and then we counted out to see how many we had of each. We also used them to do subtraction and find out the difference between two colors, etc…
The completed project!
{and yes, he was trying to make his eyes look like that!}
Songs and Rhymes
The girls knew a Fruit of the Spirit song that they had heard on JellyTelly, so they taught us that, but I couldn’t find it anywhere online to show you all {sigh}. We did find another song though on DLTK that the boys thought was a riot! It’s a cadence/song ~ so really no singing, just more ‘military’ fashion:
I don’t know what you’ve been told… Galatians’ got the fruit of gold. Patience, joy, love, peace and faith… With gentleness He’ll get the praise.
Self-control with kind and good… We’ll be like Jesus said we should… Ask me what would Jesus do? Galatians 5 Verse 22
Sound off: Galatians 5 Bring it on down: Verse 22
Galatians 5 Verse 22
WE'VE GOT- THE FRUIT!
(optional ending) WE”VE GOT- (clap) - (stomp) - THE FRUIT!
Additional Resources
Danielle’s Place ~ crafts and additional activities for the Fruits of the Spirit{many require membership}.
Share what you are doing with your kids! The updated guidelines can be found here if you need them.
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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
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
Share what you are doing with your kids! Please link your exact blog post to the Mr. Linky below and link back here too! The updated guidelines can be found here if you need them.
