What Elle(4.5 yrs old) has been learning!

Because our blog is new, I wanted to add a lot of content in a few posts in order to document what we have been up to over the month of October. Learning is a year-round thing for us (many times 6-7 days per week at the request of our children), so you will see lots of the same pj's (Elle is like her Mom in believing in "comfort over style";), but lots of fun activities as well! We hope we inspired you a bit today!! If you have any questions or comments, PLEASE feel free to leave them below!

Our girls LOVE our anatomy puzzle and even have affectionately named her "Kaylin" LOL.

Elle making an "Itsy Bitsy Spider" minibook for her lapbook. We LOVE lapbooking!!

Elle reciting one of her Bible Verses. We love using the ones from biblestoryprintables.com and Totally Tots!

Elle and Em both made beautiful sun-catchers out of crayon shavings and waxed paper.

Elle's "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" toilet paper roll craft. We also made a lapbook for this book.

Doing some math with her abacus.

Looking at her Noah's Ark Lapbook components. Really nice lesson in counting by two's and classifying animals.

We made bird feeders out of pine cones, but Elle was more interested in measuring it--she LOVES using a ruler to measure things!

Building fine motor skills with marbles on a butterfly mat.

"Polar Bear, Polar Bear" craft and lapbook, too!

I cannot remember where I got this idea, but it is a set of words printed backwards that Elle puts up the mirror to read the words-she thought this was a lot of fun!!

During our morning Circle Time, we check the weather and day of the week here.

Doing some color sorting with various threads. There are lots of different shades, so it was a great way to sort into varying shades of each color as well.

Elle's Solar System mobile-Daddy helped with this;)

Adam and Eve story with hand shaped apple trees. She is about to glue on 

that old, nasty snake, lol.

Lifecycle of a butterfly study. She made a book out of it and focused on the book 

"The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle.

This dice math game was a LOT of fun!

Lifecycle of the butterfly book!

I think I got this from Confessions of a Homeschooler. It is a ladybug game to count the spots and compare more, less or equal.

Can't remember where I found this printable, but it may have been Confessions as well.

Elle LOVES science! We did an experiment where she hypothesized how many pennies she could put in the cup of water until the water would spill over the sides. Then, she had a lot of fun counting to 93 until the water spilled over. She guessed a low number, so she was really surprised that so many pennies would fit in the cup.

Of course, it wouldn't be Pre-K without "Green Eggs and Ham" LOL.

This was a smelling game I made up, I just put some different items in cups and covered them and numbered them. I then let the girls smell them and guess what was inside. Elle drew pictures of her answers and got all but one correct! (I put a banana, peanut butter, pretzel, lemon, and an orange in the cups).

Doing some apple sorting by size. I found that great apple tray at a thrift store for $2!

One nice component of Montessori-style learning is teaching children to respect their environments and care for their things. Cleaning up after themselves is a lesson we have to work on a lot!

This was a really fun Science experiment we did. I had Elle fill the plastic cup with beans and asked her if it was full. She said it was absolutely full and could not hold 1 more bean! Then, I asked her if she thought I could pour anything else into the cup. She said no. Then, I poured in some salt. The girls could not believe it fit! Then, I had Elle pour in the water--she was amazed that it would fit in the cup. It was a great lesson and we were able to have fun discussing how things are not always what they appear to be;)

Comparing and contrasting liquid measurements. She guessed the shorter bowl would hold more and she was right!!

Whew---I am tired, lol. And that was not all of it--it's still only October, lol!