Preschool - Family

I wasn't going to do this theme at all, but I had an extra short week that needed filled so I used it.  But because it was Labor Day, we only have two days of school this week.  It ended up being a lazy week, so not much content!


Day 1:  My Family


We started with a guessing game where I described people in the family and had him guess who I was talking about.  We did a similar activity in week one, but he didn't seem to mind the repeat.

Then we looked through a magazine and pointed out people who could be moms or dads or brothers or sisters. We talked about how not all families have a mom and a dad and how all families are different.  We read The Family Book to tie into this.

This book does a great job of describing different kinds of families, but be warned, it talks about families with two moms or two dads.  Alex thought it meant two as in one mom and one dad equals two people, so I didn't bother expounding.  I didn't want to end up in a huge discussion about being gay, etc.

We followed that by reading All Kinds of Families.

I LOVE the illustrations in this book, though it jumps back and forth from people families to grouping of item families.

Then Are You My Mother?

I felt like I had one book to many because Alex was sighing by book number three.

Next we made stick puppets of our family.  I printed off just the heads of each person in the family and glued them to popsicle sticks and then found bodies for them in a magazine.

Then I had Alex put on a puppet show for me.  The people just danced around and made funny noises.  He didn't get it.

So I put on a puppet show for him about our family.

In hindsight, this activity was too similar to the paper doll clothes activity last week.  Alex didn't get that we were looking for whole bodies and not just clothes and he seemed impatient to be done with it.  I would have skipped this altogether had I realized or found some other way to do it that didn't involve cutting from magazines.  Maybe just having him draw the family would have been better.

For our "snack" we made marshmallow people.  Basically just big and little marshmallows and toothpicks stuck together.  I happen to have edible markers, so we used those to decorate them.

I made Alex and Ella on the left, and Alex made Mommy and Daddy on the right.  And lots of marshmallows were consumed.  Ugh.


Day 2: Relatives


We started by looking at pictures of Grandma and Grandpa, the ones we aren't living with.  They see enough of them.  It was actually kind of sad because I showed Alex a picture of Anton's dad who died almost two years and he didn't know who he was.  So I spent a lot of time looking at pictures of him and talking about him.  Then we talked about aunts and uncles and so on.

We read the book Grandma, Grandpa and Me by Mercer Mayer.

Then we read What Aunt's Do Best/What Uncles Do Best by Laura Numeroff.

 

It's a reversable book with the same story from front and back but about aunts one way and uncles the other.

And the last book was The Relatives Came.

We had to talk about what the word "relatives" meant since we just call our family "family."

And then to finish off our short and simple day Alex wrote a letter to Grandma and drew a picture which we will send once Ella gets a chance to write one too.  

And that's the end of family week!