Category Archives: Preschool

Make Way for Ducklings

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This week for our Five in a Row (FIAR) studies we read Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey.  I chose it because we’ve been enjoying watching the webcam of a hawk nest at Cornell University.  All three eggs hatched this week and we got to see them in almost every stage of the process.  It was amazing!  I left the site open on my computer and often we would just sit watching in awe.  It seemed like the perfect time for this story!  I know I saw this book as a child, but I don’t remember ever reading it.  I missed out!  Ian and I both enjoyed reading this one over and over throughout the week.

On Wednesday we went to a local park to try to find the mama duck and ducklings Grandma had spotted the day before, but to no avail.  Instead we just enjoyed watching the adult ducks and I taught the boys the differences between the males and females.  Ian was really disappointed not to see any ducklings, so we prayed that God would give a chance to see some.  On Friday morning as I was getting Arianna dressed, it occurred to me that we should try another park that day.  The boys were thrilled at the sudden plans (I am NOT a spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment type of person) until they found it we were returning to the scene of our unfortunate duck incident back in January.  (Elijah still reminds me at least once a week out of the blue, “Mommy, the duck ate my chicken.”)  Ian insisted as we drove there, “I do NOT like that park.  I don’t EVER want to go there again.”  Mean Mommy wasn’t giving in.  Thankfully, the ducks and geese were all on their best behavior.  The boys relaxed and we enjoyed the warmth of the sunshine along with the cool breeze as we walked along the water’s edge.  And lo, and behold…

Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Mallard!  Hello, Ducklings!  There were only 5, but of course Ian started to call them by name: “Jack! Kack!.. Mack!… Pack!… Quack!” We spent quite a bit of time watching the family before moving on towards the playground for lunch.  Needless to say, this is now Ian’s FAVORITE park.

  

Other things we did at home this week (in addition to many discussions out of the Five in a Row manual (Vol. 2):

  • I found lots of ideas from this unit study, including a great collection of “uck” word family activities.
  • I also used some of the pages from the lapbook at HomeSchoolShare to do one of the math activities in the manual.
  • We watched the Reading Rainbow episode “Chickens Aren’t the Only Ones,” which talks about other animals that lay eggs.  Ian was so fascinated and delighted in telling all about how turtles lay eggs too!
  • For our mapping activity, we went on a Google Lit Trip, which was fabulous!  It was so much fun to see Boston on the map and “travel” around the city to all the places in the book with real pictures of what it looks like today.  (We first watched it on YouTube, but the pace was a little quick for me.)  Someday I hope we’ll make it to Boston to see the Public Garden in person!

To see what other FIAR books we’ve rowed, see my “Index of FIAR Posts.”  Also, a great place to see what other people have done with FIAR books is the FIAR Blog Roll at Delightful Learning.

Posted in FIAR, Literature Units, Preschool

The Holy Spirit (Pentecost)

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We’re almost through the ABC Jesus Loves Me 3-Year Old Curriculum, but I wasn’t ready to end our Bible lessons with Jesus returning to heaven, so for the next few weeks we’ll be on our own as we finish up the New Testament.  This week we talked about the disciples receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  It’s a hard story for me as an adult to fully wrap my mind around, so my goal was just to present the whole event as told in Scripture, touch on some basic concepts, and then let it go.  Sometimes I’m content with just laying a foundation for future learning.  Here were the concepts I wanted Ian to understand:

  • Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to His followers.
  • If we follow Jesus, the Holy Spirit lives in our hearts and helps us become more like Christ.
  • The Holy Spirit helped the disciples speak other languages so everyone could hear the good news about Jesus.

For our memory verse, I chose Romans 5:5, which we sang to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”:

“God’s love has been poured into our hearts, through the Holy Spi-rit. Romans chapter 5, verse 5; Romans chapter 5, verse 5. God’s love has been poured into our hearts, through the Holy Spi-rit.”

Most of my teaching centered around listening to our iPod playlist and having LOTS of discussions.  Here’s what was playing this week:

We talked about what languages are and I shared little bits of French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swahili with Ian.  (I SO wish I were fluent in another language, but unfortunately I just know a few basics in lots of languages.  Helpful for finding my way around in foreign countires, but it doesn’t exactly help me really communicate!)  He was really fascinated by the whole concept.  He’s heard people speaking Spanish and Korean, but I don’t think it really clicked with him what was going on until this week.

I’ve kind of slacked on our Bible Notebook with the last few lessons.  I hope to do a few more pages this year, but then I’ll have to rethink the whole thing.  I don’t like being so inconsistent, but neither do I want to let myself get so caught up in “producing” something tangible that our lessons suffer.

Posted in Bible lessons, Preschool

Jesus Returns to Heaven

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We are rapidly coming to the end of the Bible lessons from the ABC Jesus Loves Me 3-Year Old Curriculum!  This was Week 34, covering the ascension of Jesus into heaven from Acts 1:8-11.  I also extended the lesson to talk about Jesus’ Second Coming and heaven in general, since the Bible memory verse was, “In my Father’s house are many mansions… I go to prepare a place for you.” John 14:2.

Retelling the story for Daddy

We had a great time discussing the lesson this week.  We started out bright and early Monday morning reading through the story in ALL our story Bibles: The Beginner’s Bible (by Karyn Henley), The Bible in Pictures for Little Eyes, The Rhyme Bible Storybook, Classic Bible Stories: A Family Treasury.  (Confession: the kids had woken me up much earlier than usual and I was just trying to fight off the grumpies.  Pulling them into my lap and reading Bible stories was the only “good mom” thing I could come up with in my drowsy state.  Luckily it satisfied them until I was more fully awake and in control of myself.) Later that day we listened to the actual Bible passage on our iPod playlist (see below) as we ran errands.  On Tuesday I retold the story from the ESV Seek and Find Bible using our flannel board set.

I loved the questions that came up this week!  Ian and I talked a lot about heaven.  He asked if I was going to be there, and I told him yes, because I love Jesus and follow Him.  I don’t remember exactly how the conversation went, but Ian expressed his own faith for the first time in course of that discussion.  He’s usually very reserved about making faith personal (doesn’t like praying on his own, at least out loud), so it was very sweet. We followed up on this discussion by reading Heaven is for Real For Kids.  I loved how it was full of Scripture, as well as being told from a child’s perspective. (There are some details that are extra-biblical, but they don’t contradict Scripture, so we just talked about what the Bible DOES say.)

One idea I liked for telling this story was releasing helium balloons and watching them ascend into the clouds like Jesus.   Sounds great, right?  Well, it helped the boys visualize what happened.  NOTE TO SELF: next time, buy balloons to KEEP as well.  Every time we read the story after this activity, Ian would comment, “I do NOT like letting balloons go.”

  

  

It would have been worth an extra $2 to have balloons to play with for a couple days rather than just two sad boys who associate the Ascension with losing balloons!

That was it for us this week (at least for our Bible lesson).  No notebook page, but here’s the Bible portion of our iPod playlist:

Posted in ABCJesusLovesMe, Bible lessons, Preschool

Resurrection Day!

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I think this was the most meaningful Easter I’ve ever celebrated, probably because we were so intentional about focusing on the story of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection all week with the children.  Actually, I think from now on I want to take more time (as in 2-3 weeks) to focus on it, the same way we do with Christmas.  There were so many things I wanted to pack into this past week, and we didn’t get to half of them because I wanted to take at least a bit of time to really enjoy what we did choose to include.  I’ll definitely have to keep a file full of ideas to use in years to come!

I’ve been timing our Bible lessons so that we would be on Week 32 of the ABC Jesus Loves Me 3-Year Old Curriculum, which covers the story.  However, I ended up pretty much just doing our own thing.  Not only did we not get to everything I planned, we ended up changing our focus completely.  I had intended to use The Parable of the Lily by Liz Curtis Higgs as our “book of the week”, but we never even got to it because Ian got so into Benjamin’s Box and “Resurrection Eggs.” (In case you’re not familiar with them, a Resurrection Eggs set is made up of a dozen plastic eggs, each a different color and each containing a small object that represents part of the Passion story–except for the last one, which is empty to represent the empty tomb.)

Resurrection Set

Resurrection set from Oriental Trading

Okay, confession time. I had heard of Resurrection Eggs before, but to be perfectly honest, I was skeptical of how well they’d be received.  It just seemed a little too commercial somehow.   I was SO wrong!  Something in me (hmm, Holy Spirit maybe?) prompted me to go ahead and buy some the week before.  (I know some people have put together their own sets, but I just wasn’t sold enough on the idea to devote that much time and energy to it.) I put them out on Monday with the resurrection scene I’d gotten from Oriental Trading Company and all our Easter books.  Ian was immediately intrigued and wanted to know more about them.  I had him come over to sit with me and told him he could open one egg at a time as we went through the book Benjamin’s Box.   (Another confession: I wasn’t so sure about this book either.  It seemed like a gimmick to get me to buy the eggs.  So I hadn’t bought it, just put it on my Paperback Swap wishlist after hearing people talk about it last year, and lo and behold, it became available and I thought, “Sure, why not?”  Again, SO glad we had it!)  I don’t think Ian would have sat through the book if it hadn’t been for the eggs, but having them there kept him engaged the whole time.  He really enjoyed getting out each object and talking about how it fit into the story of Passion Week.  Later, when we watched watched The Animated Passion video together, Ian kept the eggs with him and opened them as we got to each part of the story.  So I am now an avid fan of Resurrection Eggs!  They helped Ian grasp the details of the story in an incredible way, and he enjoyed using them to tell the story to himself and to others in our household over and over.  Even after Easter Sunday, he wanted to keep going through them.  (We’re taking a “Spring Break” this week so I hadn’t rushed to put away anything from last week.)Anyway, that became the main focus of our week.  (For our Bible notebook, I kept it pretty simple: “He Lives”  Cross Make-a-Sticker Scene sticker set from Oriental Trading Company.)  We did read through a few other books, though we didn’t get through everything on our list (but I’ll share the whole thing):

We also attempted to make “resurrection rolls,” which I’ve seen mentioned on more blogs than I can count.  We learned one very important lesson: USE FRESH MARSHMALLOWS.  At least I think that’s what went wrong.  (I thought I’d use up what we had in the cupboard. Oops.)  We had SO much fun “anointing” our marshmallows in melted butter, rolling them in cinnamon sugar, and wrapping them in crescent roll dough.  I didn’t do the greatest job at pressing the seams together, so a number of them split open.  But the bigger flop was that our marshmallows didn’t melt away the way they were supposed to!  They still tasted great, but I’m afraid the boys are going to be pretty disappointed next year when the “tombs” are actually empty!

  

I think my favorite thing about this week was listening to “Easter carols” on our iPod playlist.  Most of them were songs that have played a meaningful part in past Easter celebrations in my life, and I found myself tearing up several times throughout the week as we listened.  Do you have any favorite Resurrection-related hymns/songs that we can include in the future?  Here’s our playlist from the week (including our memory verse, John 3:16):

All the things we did this week created such anticipation for Sunday morning.  Some of the songs we sang at church were songs we’d been listening to.  Ian was so excited when he heard, “He is risen!” and he knew to respond, “He is risen, indeed!”  Worship with our congregation was a beautiful, joyous celebration.

I’m already excited about celebrating again next year. I’m hoping to incorporate a lot of the “Sense of the Resurrection” ideas Amanda posted over at impressyourkids.org.  (She also listed tons of other ideas to help you plan a “Meaningful Easter.”)  I also loved some of the ideas from Desiré at whenyourise.com.  What sort of things did you do with your kids to focus on Christ this Easter season?

Posted in ABCJesusLovesMe, Bible lessons, Preschool

Jesus Rides on a Donkey (Palm Sunday)

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A few years back, our church started what has become one of my favorite traditions.  On Palm Sunday all the children and youth come into the sanctuary toward the end of the music time waving palm branches as the entire congregation sings “Hosanna” and makes a joyful noise.  It is one of the few times throughout the year that we all worship together, and it is a beautiful experience every time.  So as we went through the Week 31 lesson plan from the ABC Jesus Loves Me 3-Year Old Curriculum I was not only trying to teach the Bible story but also prepare Ian and Elijah for this joyous Palm Sunday celebration.  I wanted them to know why we wave the palm branches and to be able to sing along because they had been hearing the song all week.

We kept things pretty simple.  I introduced the story by singing “Hosanna” to the boys.  They looked at me kind of funny, so then I told them it was part of our Bible story and they eagerly gathered around the flannel board to hear Mark 11:1-10.  To be honest, I think they still thought I was a little crazy, but they got into the story more as the week went on.  We read from The Beginner’s Bible (by Karyn Henley), The Bible in Pictures for Little Eyes, and The Rhyme Bible Storybook for Toddlers, as well as listening to our iPod playlist (see below) several times.  By the end of the week Ian was singing “Hosanna” at the top of his lungs as we drove in the car and asked me to stop singing so he could “do it by myself” (luckily he couldn’t see the Elijah was still singing quietly or I’m sure we would have had some issues).

Of course when Sunday came along, he was too shy to sing along with the congregation, but I think he was pleased that he could have done it if he had so chosen.  And Elijah knew just what to do with his palm branch when he heard the worship team start singing “Hosanna”  I didn’t take any pictures during the service, but the boys brought their branches home to play with later.

Here was our iPod playlist:

I also got out a few of our Easter books that mentioned Jesus’ “Triumphal Entry” into Jerusalem, but I’ll include those in my post on what we do next week as we talk about the death, burial, and especially the resurrection of our Lord.

Posted in ABCJesusLovesMe, Bible lessons, Preschool

The Red Carpet

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Our Before Five in a Row book this past week was The Red Carpet by Rex Parkin.  It seemed appropriate for the week when we were studying Palm Sunday, since they rolled out the red carpet for Jesus as He made His “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem.  Oh, wait.  That was cloaks and palm leaves.  Close enough.   It was still a fun read (one of our favorites from B4FIAR, I think).

The boys had fun driving their cars along a red ribbon (though I wish I’d checked the spool more carefully before I bought it–it wasn’t as long as I would have liked).

  

We spent a wonderful afternoon making pretzels together (in honor of Tony Tortoni’s pretzel cart that got upset when the carpet went whizzing past)!  There’s also a fun episode of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood that Ian adored (Vol.2 Episode 2 “How people make pretzels”, available streaming free for Amazon Prime members)

  

And as a special treat, the boys got “Red Carpet Candy.”  (Okay, it was “Fruit by the Foot.”  But it qualifies as candy in my book.)

Academically, I introduced Ian to the concept of counting by twos as we looked at pictures of the policemen riding their motorcycles in pairs.  He was a little confused by the way I was counting, so I explained.  I still don’t think he got it, but that’s okay.  He’s got plenty of time to figure it out.  I just wanted to put the idea in his head.

I also printed out a bunch of pages for Ian’s workbook from Homeschool Creations and the HomeSchool Share lapbook components.  They are just little extras he always enjoys when he gets a chance.  We didn’t get to everything this week, but I’ll just keep it in my Red Carpet file.  I’m sure we’ll row it again in a couple years!

Posted in B4FIAR, Literature Units, Preschool

Index of Before Five in a Row (B4FIAR) posts

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We’ve also touched on a couple of the books without thoroughly rowing them as part of our unit on the Fruit of the Spirit:

And finally, this isn’t a B4FIAR book, but we spent time with it in a similar manner:

For more ideas from other blogs, check out Michelle’s Before Five in a Row link-up page over at Delightful Learning, where people have shared links organized by book.

Posted in B4FIAR, Index, Preschool

Jesus Loves the Little Children

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Jesus Loves the Little Children

The story of the children coming to Jesus takes up only a few short verses in each of the synoptic gospels, but its message is crucial for our little ones to understand.  Jesus wasn’t a distant, untouchable celebrity, nor was he too busy or self-important to be bothered by the impressionable youngsters whose parents brought them to be blessed.  The King of Kings saw the value of these precious babes and made sure his disciples learned the priority of welcoming children into the Kingdom.  Not only should we adult disciples “let them come,” but we should learn to “become like” the little children.  What an encouraging message for preschoolers!  We had a lot of fun going through Week 30 of the ABC Jesus Loves Me 3-Year Old Curriculum

This week I introduced the story with a song from a lesson at missionarlington.org. It is set to the tune of “Are You Sleeping” and goes like this:

Jesus sat upon a hi—ll, with His friends, with His friends.

All the little children wanted to see Jesus

So they ran, so they ran.

“Stop the children, stop the children,” said the men, said the men.

Jesus said, “I love them, and I want to bless them.

Let them come. Let them come.”

It was a fun way to change things up a little bit, plus it required the boys to practice their listening skills to know what we were talking about.

We read the story from Mark 10:13-16, which I love because it specifically says that Jesus “took them in his arms and blessed them.”  What a beautiful picture!  Imagine what it would have been like to be a small child nestled in the arms of the kindest, gentlest, most loving person to ever walk the face of the earth.  What pure delight to gaze into his twinkling eyes and feel his tender touch!  I’d guess they never wanted to leave.

We acted out the story with our flannel board set, read from Ian’s ESV Seek and Find Bible, as well as from Read Aloud Bible Stories Vol. 1 and The Beginner’s Bible (by Karyn Henley).  We played a version of”Red Light/Green Light,” like the disciples telling the children to “STOP” and Jesus saying to “let them come” (another idea from the missionarlington lesson). We also looked through Precious In His Sight, a beautiful photo book of prayers for children around the world.

For our Bible notebook page we made a collage of pictures of different kinds of children.  First I cut a picture of Jesus holding a child out of a story book that had beautiful illustrations but such poor theology I didn’t want to read it to my kids.  Then we looked through old magazines to find pictures of children.  Ian has a little trouble cutting things out, so it was good practice.  (I found it helped if I tore the whole page out so he could maneuver it as he cut).

Much to my disappointment, I couldn’t find a reading of the actual Scripture for our iPod playlist this week, but the songs did a pretty good job of telling the story, as well as our memry verse for the week (“Let the children come to me…” Mark 10:14)

Posted in ABCJesusLovesMe, Bible lessons, Preschool

Harold and the Purple Crayon

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Over the last couple weeks (sickness and weather dragged it out a lot longer than I intended), we’ve been “rowing” Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson. Many of the activities in the Five in a Row (Vol. 2) manual were geared toward slightly older children, so I’m sure we’ll enjoy rowing it again later on.  We kept it simple and had a lot of fun!

As with all our school books, I made Ian wait until Monday morning before I would read it to him.  He’d seen me get the book out on Saturday and was itching to get going.  We read the story many, many times over the course of three weeks, as well as enjoying Harold and the Purple Crayon: Let Your imagination Soar  on video (which I found at the 99-cent Store a couple years ago and have been saving for our Five in a Row time.  (Both boys loved it and requested it repeatedly.)  We also watched a Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood segment on how crayons are made, which Ian found fascinating.

We took out all the purple crayons and markers we could find to compare the different shades of “purple”.  Then we each took one purple crayon and drew a picture.  This is one area where I feel like we should be spending more time.  Ian never “draws”; he just scribbles color and doesn’t even attempt to make it look like anything.  So I was very intentional about drawing a real scene.  He attempted to copy me all on his own.  He was worried that it didn’t look like mine, but I tried to reassure him that the point of art is making something that is unique.  And actually, I thought his picture turned out pretty well considering what I’m used to seeing out of him.  I think we’ll start being more intentional about “art lessons,” since he does really seem to enjoy it (and Elijah is really into it).

The highlight of our time with Harold, however, was the lesson on “Gaining a View from Altitude” (FIAR (Vol. 2), pg. 152).  We live up in the hills, so we are fortunate to be able to look down upon the “flatlands” below and see places we go on a regular basis.  (Target’s big red sign is an easy landmark for us to find.)  But we were able to take this idea even further with an awesome field trip that only cost us the gas to get there.  In the book Harold tried to figure out where he was by climbing a mountain, and he ended up coming down in a balloon that looked a lot like this one.

  

Orange County Great Park has a helium balloon that can take passengers 400 feet up in the air.

  

We loved looking down and seeing the parking lot, the carousel, the playground, the freeway, etc.  What a view!

It was a fun way to finish off our time with Harold!

To see what other FIAR books we’ve rowed, see my “Index of FIAR Posts.”  Also, a great place to see what other people have done with FIAR books is the FIAR Blog Roll at Delightful Learning.

Posted in FIAR, Literature Units, Preschool

Where to Go Next With Our Bible lessons?

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We still have a couple months’ worth of Bible lessons to get through for the ABC Jesus Loves Me 3-Year Old Curriculum, but I know the end is going to sneak up up on me more quickly than I would like.  So for the past few weeks I’ve been searching and praying for the right path for our family to take when it comes to Bible teaching once that time is here.  A few thoughts:

We don’t use the majority of the material in the lessons from ABC Jesus Loves Me.  It’s not that they’re not wonderful. On the contrary, I think they are amazing, and I’m so blessed by Heidi’s willingness to share all her hours and hours of hard with us for free!  I just choose to focus on Bible and let most of the other stuff happen in its own time.  The main thing I utilize the curriculum for is the suggested activities to enhance our time with each Bible story.  Those suggestions have led me to many wonderful resources which have made it easier to plan lessons around stories not in the ABCJLM-3YO scope and sequence.

That leads me to ask myself, if I can plan my own lessons, do I really need someone else’s curriculum?  Well, no.  I tend to tweak any curriculum I get to suit our needs (one reason I’m not willing to pay big bucks for something all laid out).  Still, it’s helpful to have something there to provide a basic framework and provide ideas.  So then I start thinking about the big picture.

I think eventually I’d like to help my kids develop habits of both reading the Bible daily (maybe going through it once a year) and devoting time to in-depth study of the Bible at a slower pace.  But that’s still a few years off, so I find myself torn between reading something new every day or taking our time and spending a whole week on a story as we’ve been doing.  I see positives to both approaches.  I want to try to include Elijah more so a slower, focused approach (like we’ve been doing) might be better.  I started doing Bible lessons when Ian turned 3, and Elijah will be 3 in the fall.

My next dilemma is what sort of framework I want: chronological or topical?  I tend to lean towards the former, both in my personal devotions and with my lessons for the kids.  But that means spending a long time on all those fabulous Old Testament stories, which leaves me missing Jesus for a big chunk of the year.  And I’ve found a number of programs I like that are more topical that I don’t want to just dismiss without due consideration.  Broaden your mind, Deanna!  Think outside your little box!

Here are some of the ideas I’m tossing around for where to go from here (all would just be spines; I plan to pretty much do my own thing no matter what I choose):

  • ABC Jesus Loves Me 4-Year Old Curriculum  Bible portion (topical, based on character traits)
  • Bible and Rhyme from Hubbard’s Cupboard (chronological; pretty even split between OT/NT)
  • “Little Ones” Calvary Curriculum (could do chronologically or according to their schedule, which alternates OT/NT)
  • My ABC Bible Verses (topical, based on Bible verses, using ABC as framework; would require more planning)
  • Long Story Short devotional book (OT only, but a companion NT book to be released.  Would be a LONG time on OT.  I’ve actually already purchased this because I’m excited to use it in the future–just not sure if now is the right time.)
  • Fruit of the Spirit (I’ve found a few good online resources for spending time on each “fruit” with preschoolers); could use this for Bible “study” and read through at a faster pace for devotions; could lead into character trait focus to finish out the year
  • OR… do I just write my own outline.  Once it’s done it could be just as useful as most of these since I don’t plan on following any of them to the letter.

So why am I processing all this “out loud” with you?  Well, for one, it just helps me clarify my thoughts to put them down in writing.  But my main reason for sharing my thought process is because I’d love feedback.  What have you used?  What have you considered?  What factors have I NOT considered but should?  My oldest child is only four, so I’ve still got a lot to figure out (and thankfully a lot of time in which to do so!)  Input! I need input!

Posted in Our Vision, Preschool
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