Preschool Cat Theme

We finished up our cat theme last week.  This one wasn't as big a hit as I had hoped, but the kids still had fun.

For our gross motor game, we pretended we were cats and crawled and meowed all across the carpet in our school room.  But, inventiably, the kids both ended up climbing onto me and Little Miss called me a horse again.  It happens every single time I'm on the floor with them!  Not going to lie, it's really cute and I love it.

I had Little Miss make this cat craft.  All I did was cut out two circles, one a little bigger then the other, two triangles for ears, two paw shapes, and a C shaped tail.  I let her glue everything down herself and made the face using a white crayon when she was done.  We have a history timeline in our school room that is just yarn and clothes pins.  We haven't used it as a time line in awhile though and I'm not sure how much Green Bubbles got out of it last year anyway but it has been repurposed as an art line.  Little Miss insisted her cat be put up on the line as soon as it was done.

We also did some of the printables from 1+1+1=1 's cat preschool pack.  I was able to get Green Bubbles to review some of the things we learned last year in a very informal way without sit down instruction.  School is starting back up soon and I wanted him to have a refresher before we dived back in.  We practiced numbers 1-20 and the alphabet.  I gave Little Miss things to color from the pack and let her do the patterns page which she just whized through. 

And, as always, we read a lot of books.  There are a LOT of cat books out there so I only picked our top 5 that we read to share with you.

Pete the Cat: Rocking in My School Shoes - I think I must have been living under a rock to not have heard about Pete the Cat.  He's popular, has a lot of books and it is easy to see why.  There is a lot of repetition in this book and Green Bubbles loved trying to guess what Pete was going to sing next.  Little Miss really didn't care for it at all, but it was a little older for her.  It's also a good book since we're starting back up in school soon!  Even though this book is a public school type book that talks about classrooms and libraries, it is still a cute read.

Kitten's First Full Moon - This was a perfect Little Miss book.  It's the story about a kitten who thinks the moon is a bowl of milk and his adventures trying to get to it.  This is a classic story and one I'm going to buy for our collection.

James Herriot's Treasury for Children: Warm and Joyful Tales by the Author of All Creatures Great and Small - We actually read Moses the Kitten by James Herriot but this link is for a book of a lot of his stories and I highly recommend it.  We actually own Moses the Kitten but checked it out from the library because it has run off somewhere for the time being and I wanted to make sure we read it again.  It's the story of a little kitten who is saved by a county vet and nursed back to health by the farmers and a pig.  All of his stories are very sweet.

I Must Have Bobo! - (Note: The picture above is of the sequel but I like this one much better).  The first book in the series is really sweet.  It's about a boy and his sock money, Bobo.  Bobo is his security blanket and best friend.  But watch out for Earl, the cat!  He loves to take Bobo.  Little Miss and Green Bubbles both loved looking for Earl on each page waiting to see when he'll make his move.

Cat Up a Tree - This was a great book.  Cats keep getting stuck up in a tree and no one will help get them down!  We also used this as a counting book for Green Bubbles because more and more cats end up in the tree.  (25 at one count!)