Easter Preschool and Kindergarten Mini Unit

New addition to our best-selling centres' activities... the EASTER PRESCHOOL AND KINDERGARTEN MINI UNIT!!! Like its predecessors, it got loads of printable activities that your kids will definitely love! This mini-unit has a combined thematic theme: easter chick, bunny and religious activities.

Easter Eggs Letter and Number Cards

Our Easter Egg Letter and Number Cards set is now up in our shop, ready for you to enjoy and use in your thematic activities this Lent and Easter season!

Collection of Easter Activities and {Learn & Play Link Up}

How do you observe the Lenten season? I was raised in a Catholic family and growing up, I participated in a lot of church and community activities tied to the observance of Lent.  The activties has helped me understand the meaning of Lent and the celebration of life on Easter. 

 

Last year we observed the Lenten season with some religion study, identifying their traditions and practices to understand their faith.  I find it important that we must introduce our kids to the different religions of the world not just ours, to be able to appreciate and respect everyone’s belief. 

 

Easter Learning Trays for Toddlers

Sharing Max's activity trays for Easter. He is currently 32 months old.

Easter Story Sequencing - Observance of Holy Week

What does the Easter times mean to you? Growing up, our Holy Week and Easter is focused more on the religious side... reflecting on the life and story of Jesus. If you grow up in the Philippines like me, we don't do Easter bunnies and Easter baskets (this is too much for such a poor country, I guess).  But we do have Easter egg hunts. I remember we often do this right after the Easter mass in the church's backyard.  Our version of Easter eggs are not made of chocolates but decorated boiled eggs. 

Anyway, I want to expose my kids to the religious tradition and practices that we observed back in my country home.  We've done lots of religious works for the past years. You can read about it here and here.  This year, I wanted to focus on Jesus, the many miracles he made and how he has touched the people's lives.  In this post, though, I'm highlighting how we worked on the last days of Jesus that led to his death.

Chicks Addition Game

Last Easter my son and I had a wonderful time playing this “Where’s the Easter Card” game. Here I had 9 cards with numbers on it, I used chicks as counters and an Easter Card (not shown).

The mechanics of the game is similar to the ones played by Julie in the Adventures of Bear for “Where’s the Cake?” game.

Here, I hide the Easter card under a number card. Then I give him an addition problem to solve. The answer to the question is where the Easter card is hidden.

He puts the chicks on a container to count.

Here he is working on 4 and 4 is 8.

And can you see how happy he is when he guess it correctly?

We love this game and he truly enjoyed it!

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Easter Religious Preschool Unit

Presenting our Easter Religious Preschool Unit! 

Learning Activities for 28 Months Toddler

These are the activities designed for Vito for this month as we are celebrating springtime integrating St. Patrick’s Day and Easter.  Materials used are provided below for your reference.

Toddler Beginnings 07

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I can barely take photos of Vito doing activities these days as my hands are also too busy being involved with it.  So one technique that most blogger Moms do is to take photos ahead of their materials for presentation.  I’d like to borrow this technique, but I will try to do my best to take snap shots of Vito doing these activities in action since I still find it cute to post some photos of him LOL. 

UPPER PHOTOS

• Montessori Letter Work book and Bible Stories (for Lent)
• Yellow Colour Basket
• Hape Counting stackers (a favourite!)

MIDDLE PHOTOS

• Mini unit block toys (he is enjoying stacking this blocks!)
• Melissa and Doug Jumbo Zoo Puzzle

BOTTOM PHOTOS

• Easter egg 1:1 correspondence activity
• Melissa and Doug Latches
• Easter Egg matching colour tray

We’ve been using the Montessori Letter work for weeks now and Vito loves tracing the letters.  We’re also reading the Bible Stories (this was Mavi’s) for Lent.  The rest of our reading/language materials can be found here.

Because Easter is just around the corner, we’re doing a few Easter themed activities. This one is a colour matching activity. I got the pail from a local book store and the yellow mini baskets from Dunnes.  I am sure that there’s plenty of these at Amazon.

Another activity is the 1:1 correspondence. Vito loves transferring objects and I am sure he’s going to enjoy this one!

   

New activity this week is the building of blocks!  This is an old toy  and I got it out for Vito to use.  Vito is starting to enjoy stacking the blocks.  I torn between getting the pink tower and brown stairs or Melissa and Doug Unit Blocks.

                    

We love our Giotto Bebe finger paints! It has NO SMELL AT ALL and SO EASY TO WASH!  I came across this brand when we were staying in Belgrade and I fell in love with it instantly. Their finger paints are so creamy and Vito loves its vivid colours! And it is sooo easy to remove (and non toxic too!). 

                   

And I let him use our  Do-a-Dot markers!  This is colouring a cross for Lent.  We’re taking a break from crayons and pens so I’m letting him use this stamp markers for variation.  This he has to practice stamping, not writing as he used to.  I have to demonstrate first what to do with it. We’ll be using this a little bit more for practice.

 

It has been sunny for the past weeks and we’re always outdoors! 

 

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March Activities and {Learn & Play Link Up}

March is fast approaching and I’ve been doing some planning for the boy’s activities for next month.   I am also looking forward for a warm weather so we can do outdoor play and exploration.  For this week’s featured activities, let me share Vito’s first “themed” unit:

We had a lot of fun with these, especially the scooping of pompoms and the paint works!

Now, for this week’s featured posts, I am sharing the activities that you can do for the month of March!

Bible Stories Sequencing Activity Cards

We love telling and hearing Bible stories at home!  Especially in this season of Lent and as preparation for the upcoming Easter celebration.

Our Spring Season Picture Cards

Spring is just around the corner and I’ve been thinking about the activities that the boys and I can do. I was very much inspired by Deb’s post on Spring Season Cards, so I borrowed the idea of printing pictures that relates to spring and we will be using them for the follwing:

• introducing the season of spring to Vito
• creating stories using the picture cards
• inspiration for crafts
• inspiration for outdoor activities
• St. Patrick and Easter activities
• farm animals and their babies
• animal life cycles

Montessori Inspired Dinosaur Activity Trays for Preschoolers

This is a long overdue post because we’ve been doing a lot of outdoor activities lately.  Most kids are really fascinated with dinosaurs, especially my eldest who’s obsessed with these prehistoric animals.  So last Easter break, we revisited some of our dinosaur activities and introduced new ones to Vito.  Here’s a roundup of our dinosaur activities which both of the kids enjoyed during the break and I hope your kids will love this too.

The Story of Christmas - Sequencing Activity

Earlier today, Vito and I spent a delightful time creating our Nativity Sequencing Story to celebrate Advent. In the past few days, we have been reading various books on the Christmas story, and today, we worked on some extension activities to practice some skills that I will mention below.

How We Learn Colours These Days

We finally started our colour toddler basket last week wherein we put red objects in the basket for learning colours.  We started with the colour Red, the colour of Valentines Day and Chinese New Year

There are so many versions of this basket, sometimes they are called discovery baskets or treasure baskets wherein Mommies gather specific or themed objects and place them in a basket for the baby and toddler to explore.  Now what makes our version different?

B4FIAR: Ask Mr. Bear

A few weeks ago, we rowed Ask Mr Bear and pull out a Farm Animals themed as well. My son loves this book to pieces and he can almost memorize it.  There were times I can here him do a monologue using his animal figures (Safari Toobs) basing on the story.  
Here are some pictures that best describes the activities we did to go along with the book.

Story sequencing. To make it more interesting I added the objects the animals offered to Danny as a gift for his Mom.  This printable was downloaded from Homeschool Creations.

Identifying beginning sounds using the printable pack which I downloaded as mentioned previously.

Where’s the Birthday Cake game which has the same mechanism as Where’s the Easter Card game.   Another favorite math game!

 
Oh and this is exactly the reason why I seldom have time to post.  This is out of topic, but we really really love playing outdoors.
Animal farm family matching game.  The cards can be downloaded here.  Well this is just my version, I made this because I was inspired by My Montessori Moments who has a COMPLETE set of animal families for download.   

Lastly, we sort zoo and farm animals. 

I am looking forward of rowing this again, and hopefully by then I have enough idea, resources and time to carry out additional activities.
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