B4FIAR - Jesse Bear What Will You Wear?

We have been Rowing Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear.  Which was quite fitting for my child who likes to wear 10 different outfits a day lately!

Halloween week was super busy and I was out of commission for a couple days with a stomach bug and we had a couple young house guests for the weekend so school was light.

This story was my favorite so far.  The words seemed to flow perfect and the story was cute.

We started out with a surprise breakfast, Bear Pancakes!



We whipped up some Whole Wheat Pancakes and made faces out of fruit.  Then we added honey, because we all know bears love honey!

Jesse Bear plays in his sandbox but we just cleaned out our sandbox and only have water in there right now so we made some homemade playdough.  It turned out a little sticky, but Josie loved it. 

I added Pumpkin Pie Spice so it smelled awesome!

Ashley showed me an awesome site called PreKinders that I love, love, love!

I printed out a bunch of new activites for us and even squeezed in a few Halloween ones right before we went trick or treating.

For this one she rolled a die and then added that number of pumpkin seeds to the page.  It's meant to be a game where we would both play but our printer pooped out on me.

And this was a simple sheet to help work on her one to one counting.  She did really well and I loved that it was easy for her to correct the mistakes she did make.

We made bear paper dolls.

My favorite project was our Thankful Tree.  Josie asks us every night at dinner, "what are you Thank You'd for?"

I did manage to squeeze in one more Jesse Bear activity.  I had our Teddy Bear Picnic all planned out in my head, but ran out of time to execute it the way I wanted to. 

Jesse Bear eats a super healthy lunch and we were going to have the same thing but going to the grocery store with 4 kids under 4 did not sound like a good idea to me so we improvised!

I told Josie we were having our Teddy Bear Picnic over breakfast and she spent the next 4 hours brining down dolls and animals and play food!

Dora ate an entire pot of pepperoni!

  

B4FIAR - The Big Green Pocketbook

This week we read, "The Big Green Pocketbook."  It's a story about a little girl who spends a morning running errands with her Mom and collecting parts of her day in her pocketbook.

Josie loved the story and is starting to really observe things in the pictures more and more.

We were able to do a few of the activities from the book, but a lot of our work was crafty or basic preschool skills this week.

And apparently we enrolled her in Night School since most our schooling happened after bath and PJ time!

I introduced Addition this week.  She sorta understood and loved playing with the bears.

The Mom in the book goes to the Post Office.  Josie always loves the Post Office but I didn't have anything to send off.  So we spent time making Thank You cards for some special people.

Josie drew her first person and a dog.  Her Grandpa would be proud!

Fall Wreath

I didn't have a need to go to a lot of the places in the book, but I did have a few errands and thought that captured the feel of the book.  We headed to the Car Wash.

Not Josie's favorite.

And then I enlisted some cheap (aka - free) child labor and made her vacuum her side of the car.  She loved it and I spent the entire time making sure she didn't get her hair sucked off her head.

Then we headed to the Post Office to mail her special letters!

This Parking Deck topped the list of favorites for this week!  Two old cereal boxes, 4 toilet paper rolls, and a couple sheets of construction paper later and we have a mini "Whole Foods!"

The girl loves it!  I love when free stuff is a hit!

For Friday Life Skills we had a little more Child Labor.  Please don't report me!

I swear she thought it was fun!

And we roased pumpkin seeds for our baking project.  Although I quickly learned that nobody in our house likes roasted pumpkin seeds so it was a bit of a waste.

B4FIAR - Goodnight Moon

This week's book was Goodnight Moon.  It was another one that was super easy to get Preschool ideas to go with it.  Which was good because I'm usually in a bit of a funk after coming home from Minnesota. 

We had another insane week.  Between field trips, hot air balloon shows, and photo shoots (for a real magazine!) we were barely home.  We ended up only doing B4FIAR 2 days. 

Opps.

I did finally try out the tray system and it-was-amazing!

The nights before we did school, I put each activity with all the needed supplies in a drawer and then let Josie pick what order she wanted to go in.  

She loved it, I loved it, it's staying!

We made our Tissue Bowls for our "bowl full of mush."

We hung mittens and socks, just like in the book.

We talked a lot about the moon and the different phases it goes through.  She caught on to this more then I expected and even pointed out the Cresent one night!

We are learning to write letter I this week.  We are using 1+1+1=1's verse print outs for our memory verses.  This week was "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me."

We played Don't Drop The Balloon where, you guessed it, the object was to not let the balloon touch the floor.  She thought this was hilarious! 

I forgot to buy balloons so we used animal balloons left over from her birthday!

I made her some Halloween Pattern Cards with some strips of construction paper and stickers.

We talked about how the Moon goes around the Earth and the Earth spins to make day and night. 

Way over her head, but it was a great lead in to our art project!

We sang "He's Got The Whole World In His Hands" and whipped this bad boy up.

      

And we FINALLY used the Cloth ABC's that I made her last year!

She loved them!  I had her pull them out one at a time and tell me what letter it was and what sound it made.

   

Then we spelled some words!  I called out the letter and she ran to find it.

We wrapped up our school week with our Friday Baking Project.

I found this cute (and easy) recipe for making Candy Corn Sugar Cookies over at Tidy Mom and they turned out great!

Tidy Mom is one of my favs.  She has awesome ideas.

And if you didn't see it this weekend, watch this video of Josie "reading."  

Oh how I love this child!

Tissue Paper Bowls

Not the most creative title for a post, but it does the job.

We are reading Goodnight Moon for our Five In A Row work.  We had plans to eat a "bowl full of mush" but I wanted to do a creative project for the bowl first.

All you'll need is a bunch of squares of tissue paper, watered down glue, a bowl (for a template), and saran wrap.  I didn't have saran wrap so we used tin foil.  It worked but not nearly as well as saran wrap would have.

Wrap your template bowl in saran wrap and flip it upside down.

Then paint on some watered down glue and cover with tissue squares.

To make a bowl that will last you need to do this at least 5 times (5 layers).  We got lazy and stopped at one.

Carefully pull the saran wrap off and set it up to dry. 

When it's done, trim the edges and fold a little over to create a finished edge.

We ended up not eating our mush out of them since she wanted to keep it.  They are a bit flimsy, but work great for feeding her imaginary dogs!