R is for Robot!

Books

We borrowed these fun books for our robot day. Another favorite, which we discovered during our Robot Unit two years ago, is Boy + Bot. This is always such a fun theme!

Letter Recognition

For our letter R activity today, I gave Little M&M and Honey Pot a template of the letter R to fill with robot stickers. I found these at the Dollar Tree, and we had plenty leftover for future sticker activities.

Robot Tinker Tray

We had done a tinker tray for the first time last Halloween. It was one of the most engaging activities we had ever done! We had done foam pumpkins at the time, but with most of the same supplies we used this time.

    

For this activity, I used floral foam and foil, both purchased from the Dollar Tree.

And here is what I provided at the kids' craft table: pom poms, straws, pipe cleaners, rubber bands, toothpicks, paper clips, hole punch reinforcements, thumb tacks, brads and googly eyes. I also set out some glue and a pair of scissors.

They were so excited to get started! Little M&M was a big fan of the rubber bands.

While Honey Pot went crazy with toothpicks.

Here she is attaching two foam blocks together to make a larger robot!

And Little M&M loves scissors. He cut all of the straws into teeny tiny pieces.

I sat right beside them, working on my own robot, so I could watch them closely with the sharper pieces. They were both very careful.

Here is Honey Pot's first finished product:

Mine:

And Little M&M's:

We used these for pretend play, all the while rearranging their parts and adding more pieces. Here, Honey Pot added rubber band bracelets:

Lots of pom pom antenna:

And here is the little baby robot she made.

It was a super fun activity and, just as the Halloween version, lasted a long time!

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Q is for Quack!

Books

We borrowed these books from the library for our letter Q day. We had read Dawdle Ducking from the library a long, long time ago and it has actually become a nickname for Honey Pot when she's dawdling sometimes. And we always enjoy the Little Quack books. Both of these stories were very cute.

Letter Recognition

For our letter recognition activity today we used water to "paint" over the letter Q on a chalkboard. This is a fun, simple activity we do sometimes. The kids enjoy it!

 

Duck Pond - Small World

We had made a frog pond small world a while back, and it was a huge hit. We use our water table or a water sensory bin almost daily in the summertime, so I was looking for something different. Instead of water, we made a fresh batch of homemade playdoh to serve as our pond. First the kids helped me mix the ingredients together:

 

Then, after it had cooked on the stove for a few minutes, they helped me knead the dough:

 

Here was the final product. We ended up making two batches for an extra big duck pond.

 

We included some craft sticks, gems, textured paper lily pads and rubber ducks.

 

The kids spent a lot of time forming their pond, squishing the lily pads onto the water and using their imaginations. As occurred in the Little Quack book we read, the kids even grabbed their little frogs to add to the pond for friends.

 

The play went on for a long time. They built a bridge too at one point!

 

Our recent family movie night was Tangled, so the kids wanted some floating lanterns to set off above the pond. So we added some battery-operated candles to our play today too.

 

P is for Pancakes!

Books

We are continuing our letter of the day activities (instead of letter of the week) so we can finish before Little M&M begins preschool. Here were our choices for the letter P. Both very cute, and these types of Laura Numeroff books are a favorite in our house!

Letter Recognition Activity

For our letter recognition activity, the kids completed a pattern block puzzle. This one can be printed from Making Learning Fun.

Kitchen and Science - Making Pancakes

We worked on our culinary skills today. Little M&M and Honey Pot made us a pancake dinner, mostly by themselves. First they helped to mix the batter.

Then I let Honey Pot try to pour the batter onto the griddle.

And both kids took turns watching the batter begin to bubble, and then flipping the pancakes. I was so pleasantly surprised at how well they did with this task. 

And it was delicious! We may need to get these kids cooking dinner more often. :)

O is for Outer Space!

Books

These are our O is for Outer Space books for the day. The Magic School bus book is from our own collection, and a true favorite for my kids. We LOVE it.

Letter Recognition

For our letter recognition activity today we just drew O's on a piece of construction paper, and filled their shape with smiley face stickers.

Outer Space Craft

For today's main activity we created a large poster of our solar system. It was a combined effort, and it all began with some splat painting! The kids love doing this! We watered down some white paint, and flicked our paintbrushes at the black poster paper.

We wound up with a pretty awesome glimpse of outer space.

Initially, I was going to have each of them paint one planet, but then I came across a great printable of all the planets in their relative sizes. So I printed those out and started cutting them out while the kids worked on painting the sun with pom pom brushes.

They smeared them across the page for a fun look, then we found that stamping the pom poms along the edge gave it a fantastic burning appearance.

We attached the planets with pop dots as the final touch.

Here is the final product! The kids are SO happy with it (and frankly so am I). As Honey Pot said, "It almost looks for real!"