Free ABC Valentine's File Folder Game

 Ready for a freebie?  I've started doing some type of 'activity' with Green Bubbles to help reinforce language arts concepts we've been working on.  Mostly letter identifcation and letter sounds.  We have a few file folder games but I wanted something themed for Valentine's Day that focused on the specific skills I wanted to review that we could include Little Miss in as well.

This file folder game is totally free!  If you download it please leave me a comment letting me know how you liked it.  Giving me comments makes me more likely to make things to post!  

The game board has 26 circles, each with a lower case letter.  Included in the download are also a game directions front pocket, file label for the game, and our game 'pieces'.  I included 26 hearts with capital letters on them.  The children take turns picking a letter out of a bag, or from face down on the table.  Depending on the skill level, I had Little Miss tell me the name of the letter and Green Bubbles has to tell me the sound of that letter.  Unless it's a letter I know we're having problems with.  Then I let him tell me the name or sound and I give him the part he is missing.  If they are not able to answer the question, the letter goes back into the bag. 

If they do get the letter correct, they get to put their heart on the lower case letter.  I included 26 blank hearts in the download.  I cut them out for the kids and gave half (13) to each child to let them color the hearts anyway they wanted.  I told Green Bubbles to make his hearts look the same so he colored half blue and half yellow.  Little Miss only colored 4 of her hearts, all in pink and red of course!  The first player to get all 13 of their hearts placed on the board wins. 

Of course, you can admit the rules as much as you need to in order to fit your child and who is playing.  You can make it 3 players and divide the hearts to be colored into 3's.  You can make it one player and have your child just place all the hearts themselves.  The great thing about file folder games is the way you can adapt them to fit what you need.

 For instance, Green Bubbles is still very hesitant on his letter sounds.  A lot of them he knows, but he isn't sure about.  Other times I want him to work to find out the letter name he keeps forgetting.  Everytime he wasn't sure of an answer, I sent him to our All About Reading letter chart.  I had him find the letter and look at the picture to find the beginning sound of that word.  (For example, p has a pig behind it.  He said pig out loud a few times and then proudly proclaimed /p/!)   Or I have him sing the ABC song while looking at the chart, stopping at the letter he isn't sure of. 

So, what you really want. All you need is a file folder, scissors, glue, and my download! Here's my Valentine's Day ABC Letter Sound File Folder Game.  Don't forget to leave me a comment if you download it!

Preschool - Eye Theme

Little Miss' preschool theme last week was eyes.  I followed the theme plan from letteroftheweek.com and I have to say, Eye would not be my first choice for preschool themes.  Most of the books listed weren't avaiable in my library and I couldn't really find much to fit the theme.

Sooo.. The books we did read included various I Spy books, animal camouflage, I See the Moon and the Moon Sees me and a Dr. Seuss book called You Can't Read With Your Eyes Shut. 

For our games and activies we also played I Spy using colors.  For example, I spy something blue.  Brother's shirt!  I also had her color in a picture of a large eye ball I drew.  Honestly though, the eye ball kind of creeped me out!  But Little Miss enjoyed coloring it so I guess that's all that matters.

Going forward, I don't know how often we're going to use themes with her.  I have Little Miss coloring in the ABC crafts from All About Reading Pre-level with Green Bubbles and she loves doing that. Each letter has different directions for how to 'craft' with it.  The B below suggested dipping the back of a pencil (the eraser) into blue paint and painting blueberries on the letter B.  It also had the kids cutting green construction paper and gluing it down to make grass for our blueberry bush!  She also sits in on a lot of hte rhyming games with Green Bubbles.  In fact, she's doing really well with the rhyming games and is flourishing with them.  I think Little Miss will be getting her own school time with AAR (All About Reading) now, separate from her brother so he doesn't feel like she's taking over his school time.  Also hoping to avoid competition and resentment.  I'll let you know how it goes next week!

And don't worry... we still do plenty of reading time.  It just probably won't be around a theme.

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!)

Preschool - Jungle

So it's another week and another theme.  This past week we went with Jungle!  I decided to deviate from the Letter of the Week curriculum and am mostly just using the theme as a jumping off point at this point.

First, we listened to A Carnival of Animals by Camille Saint-Saens and danced around our living room pretending to be animals in a jungle.  I threw pillows and blankets in various places to help pretend we were in a jungle.  Couches became trees, pillows were rocks, blankets spread length wise were logs, and we even ended up with some sort of pretend water feature that Green Bubbles kept ending up in.  The kids had a lot of fun with this one and it got a lot of our wiggles out.

 We also made these paper plate lions.  Little Miss picked blue for her lion while Green Bubbles went for more tradtional colors.  After coloring their plates I gave them the noses and eyes to glue on themselves.  I drew the smiles and whiskers though.  They really liked making the lions and Little Miss spent the entire week walking around with her lion roaring at everyone.  These were a big hit!

The books this week (note: links are afflicate links) --

Mr. Tiger Goes Wild - We read this one at the same time as our dancing game. It was the perfect fit since the kids were already keyed up and roaring whenever Mr. Tiger roared was acceptable at the moment.  And my kids were totally wild the beginning of the week too.  We just got back from a weekend trip and they weren't back into our normal routine yet.  Both loved this book, but I think the favorite part was when Mr. Tiger swam in the fountain and took off all his clothes.

Crocodile Beat - A story about a lot of animals making noise, waking up a crocodile, and a hero lion!  Green Bubbles loved the ending of this book and Little Miss got very involved when she realized the crocodile was awake and hungry.  We made our lion plates after reading this book too!

If I Were a Lion - A story about a little girl who's in trouble for being wild.  But she doesn't think she's wild at all and compares herself to a bunch of real wild animals.  While this one might be a stretch for a 'jungle' theme, I've read this one before with Green Bubbles when he was Little Miss' age and knew I wanted to bring it up again.  Especially since they are both in the wild stage right now!

Verdi - The story of a baby python living in the jungle who doesn't want to turn grow up and turn green.  Verdi wants to stay yellow because he thinks only yellow snakes are fast, fun, and exciting.  After an accident Verdi understands why the green snakes act the way they do and, even though he grows up as well, he learns he can still have fun.  This book was cute but for the littles was a bit of a challenge.  The beginning was tough but about half way through it Green Bubbles got more into it.  He said his favorite part was when Verdi met the baby snakes, which was the very end of the book.

The Little Little Girl with the Big Big Voice - Little Miss' favorite for the week, probably because she is a little girl with a big voice as well.  This little girl scares away a lot of big tough animals because of her big voice.  That is until she meets the lion and giggles ensure.

Gumption! -  A cute story about a little boy named Peter who goes on an adventure with his Uncle where he learns all it takes is a little gumption (and a lot of great luck) to have a great time! Green Bubbles liked this one a lot.  I think because the boy saw and did things that the uncle never even noticed.  There were elephants, crocodiles, and snakes as they made their way to the jungle and the gorilla within.  

Preschool - Cows

Recently, someone in a homeschool group I belong to asked for recommendations for preschool curriculum.  There were a lot of great suggestions and I loved looking them up.  Most of them either cost a lot of money, or were very structured however.  I knew I wanted to do something with Little Miss this coming year because she was showing interest and already picked up a lot of her ABC's and was starting to count to 10 already, but I didn't want it to be forced or very structured yet since she is still just two years old.

I almost didn't didn't look at Letter of the Week thinking it was what it said it was.  I didn't want a huge focus on just letters and sounds yet.  But I sure am glad I looked because they have a preparatory curriculum that focuses on themes for different weeks.  It includes shapes, colors, numbers, letters, and a fun theme. The first week is cows.  We decided to dive right into right now since we weren't really doing anything for school at the moment and Green Bubbles would benefit from the review.

Week one starts with the theme of cows, something near and dear to my little girl's heart right now.  We jumped on it and made it our own, although we took two weeks to complete it due to the holiday week and our nature study days. We checked out a lot of cow themed books from the library, colored in a large letter A, made square shaped cookies, and are talking about the nursery rhyme Hey Diddle Diddle and read some of the other rhymes from the website.  We made a cow out of squares, our shape of the week.  Although perhaps the favoriate of the kids was playing pretend as if we were cows.  There were many moos from all of us until I ended up being climbed on and turned into a horse!

Here's some pictures of the cows Little Miss and Green Bubbles made from a lot of squares.

Many of the books suggested by the website were not available at our library so I thought I would share a list of the books we were able to check out. (Links are affiliate).

 Little Calf by Kim Lewis - This book is a very simple story perfect for my 2 year old.  It is about a little calf learning to walk, nursing from her mother, and making friends with a little girl.  Little Miss really loved this book and it was her favoraite of the bunch.  The thought of a baby, human or animal, just excits her.  She kept giving the calf kisses on each page.  I really liked that we were able to introduce a new vocabulary word for her too, calf.

When Cows Come Home by David L. Harrison - This is a cute book about cows who play when the farmer is looking away.  Little Miss loved dancing around when I read this book because the cows swayed and twirled.  It's a very silly book with a lot of catchy, rhyming phrases.

Cows Can't Fly - Another silly book with a good message.  A little boy draws a picture of cows flying and when the cows discover it, silly things ensure.  Little Miss didn't like this book as much as Green Bubbles did. 

The Cow That Went OINK - Little Miss loved this silly book about a cow who didn't know how to say moo.  A great book to teach about animal noises and how being different can be a good thing.  It was a great follow up to the game that we played earlier pretending to be cows too!

THE STORY OF FERDINAND by Munro Leaf - If you haven't read this book you need too!  It's a great classic story that I've read to Green Bubbles many times.  While technically this book is about a bull, I still think it counts as our cow theme.  We also already owned this one!

Kiss the Cow! by Phyllis Root - Another silly story about a magic cow and a kiss.  Green Bubbles and Little Miss were both giggling over this book and the thought of kissing a cow.

Construction

 There was some road crews working in our neighborhood and Malcolm wanted to watch them.  We went outside to see what they were doing and how the machines worked.  The men were so great though!  The foreman noticed us watching and came over to talk to Malcolm.  He posed for a picture with him and then let Malcolm sit in one of the machines.  He was thrilled!