Preschool - About Me, Week 1

Day 1:  My Name and Age

We started by talking about where Alex's name came from and the different nicknames he has.  I was going to have him learn to write his name, but decided he knows how to do it well enough.  I would have used this website to print a custom name writing page.

Then we talked about famous people who have the same name as him.  I briefly talked about Alexander the Great and Alexander Graham Bell.  I was going to get books about them to read later, but completely forgot.

Then we talked about his birthday.  He gets the month he was born mixed up so we practiced a few times.  I showed him pictures from when he was a baby.

Then it was time for our activity.  I printed off a super fun growth chart from here and hung it on the wall.

Everyone got weighed and measured and we wrote our names, ages, weight and height on the chart.  Well, mommy and daddy just got their height.

We read the books A Birthday For Frances:

And I Like Myself:

And last but not least, we made homemade soft pretzels and shaped them into the letters of our names.  I used the recipe found here.  The letters didn't stay together while cooking, but the kids had fun anyways. 

Day 2:  Parts of My Body

We started off this day with a guessing game.  I described Alex and he had to guess who I was describing.  He kept guessing Ella even when I said short hair.  I had to help him out.  Then we pointed to different parts of his body and had him name them.  Then I said a part and had him point to it.

Next I got out our dry erase board and drew a picture of a person but left off one of the body parts and he had to guess what was missing.  I only got to draw two people because he took over and had me guessing what was missing on his people.  It was funny because he would forget the arms every time and so I'd guess arms and then he'd say something like it was the nose when you couldn't tell it had a face at all.

We read Inside Your Outside:

And a section from What Your Preschooler Needs to Know about bodies.

I would have also read This is Me by Richard Scarry, but the library couldn't get it in time.

Then on to the activity that was repeated for days.  We checked out a couple of fingerprint art books by Ed Emberly and I showed Alex how to make fun pictures from his fingerprints.  First we looked at them through a magnifying glass so he could see we all have different fingerprints, then we made all sorts of silly things.  

(Some of Alex's art.)

I couldn't find a good ink pad that didn't gloop up when doing fingerprints so we ended up just using washable markers.  It worked great and let us use all different colors and washed off easily.  The books were also very kid friendly in that they show each step of the drawing so they were able to do it without help.  I say "they" because Ella had to join in when she came home from school.

We were going to make gingerbread men or sugar cookie men as a treat, but the fingerprint art took the rest of the afternoon.

Day 3:  Things My Body Can Do

This was a short school day.  We started by having Alex do different motions and then talking about what part of his body he was using.  We also talked about things he can do all by himself with his body like play, brush teeth, etc.

We read the books Thank You For Me, Dancing In My Bones, 

and the story of the gingerbread man.

For an activity I was going to have him name all the things he does during the day and draw them in a timeline-like format and let him color it, but we were short on time.  Also if we'd had more time we would have made pulled taffy as a way to use our bodies, but thankfully for my waistline, we ran out of time.

And that's it for week one!