The Teacher in me is ESCAPING!!!

I am a teacher. I love young children, am a slight control freak, and adore planning units and activities. I am NOT a clean freak, therefore doing crafts and wild activites are GREAT fun for the munchkins and myself.

One thing that I FIRMLY believe in is (educationally) that teaching in THEMATIC UNITS is extremely beneficial for small children.

So I decided it was time to start some pre-school concepts with my 3 small disciples. I picked out a few themes to start with: OCEAN, BUGS, FARM, DINOSAURS

Then begins the fun part: I pick one theme (oceans) and:

1. Dig out all my books with fish, oceans, or ocean animals in them. (reading)
2. Find some handwriting pages from my fave website with an OCEAN theme (www.first-school.ws/theme/handwriting )
3. Find some DVDs about the Ocean (Finding Nemo, Veggie Tales Jonah, Disney's Ocean)
4. If feasible, head to the beach, zoo, aquarium at the end of the unit
5. Art projects - Color some fish with crayons~discuss shapes oval plus triangle tail then water color blue over the top, Water color seahorses in pastel colors, make a paper plate fish (cut a triangle out for the mouth- then staple on as tail)
6. Creative play - make jellyfish hats with a shower cap and tie tentacles on with curling ribbon
7. Fine motor- make seastars by glueing on Cheerios onto the seastar. Teaches great preschool skills of cutting and glueing. We also did the 5 senses with feeling our seastar vs. a real one.
8. Biblical - Learned about obedience and the Bible story Jonah.

I then checked and made sure that I had a balance of Language Arts (reading/writing/listening) , Math, and Science. I was pleased! **We did a ton more ~ but the rest is probably boring teacher STUFF!

Our paintings, "O" practice writing, and Ocean Charts.

We focused on 2 letters these 2 weeks ~ O and F.
Here were our 2 pages of F practices, Fish and Handwriting pages.

Here was our project that was the most fun! The Cheerios Seastars!!!

Gabe hard at work!

Gavin struggling through.

Grant doing great!

Gavin was ready to be done here from his look! I let him take a few minutes break, but made him come back and continue working!

The little ones loved doing their first handwriting. They were so proud! The shapes allowed for them to stay in a confined area first, learning the design/shape of O, before having to trace O and create their own.

And here they were! We have enjoyed starting some deliberate pre-school units.

How do you work with your children? What do you think would be fun units to do with kids? My kids are 3,3,and 4!