Alphabet House - Places We Live

Alphabet  House

– Places We Live

A house, an apartment, an RV and hotel, and houseboat (while on vacation) and, for a little bit of whimsy, a castle; all places we visited this week with Mother Goose Time Preschool. Each week we are exploring a place and opening a window on a letter of the alphabet. Which is great, cause my threes could use a lot of review with recognizing letters and sounds.

Singing our new song. 'I know what to say when we very first meet. Hello, I'm happy to see you.'
It'll really get stuck in your head.

RV and Hotel

RV Trip

I’ve seen several suggestions on Pinterest before for keeping kids busy by taping roads on the ground with painter’s tape. We created all the stops for our trip using our signs provided and played with cars to driving along the roads we created.  When David came home from school a few hours later he was inspired to expound on our simple set up and create a much larger 'Dawson Creek' complete with toy props.

Lost at the Hotel

This was a fun memory development game. I brought up a basket of supplies, things the kids might need to go and stay overnight (a blanket, towel, face cloth, soap, hairbrush, teddy bear and toothbrush) and an empty suitcase. I provided two of each item to avoid lack of sharing. We talked about what sorts of things we would need to bring with us to stay overnight and packed them into the suitcase. I asked the kids to close their eyes and snuck out took a pair of their items out of the suitcase. The kids then travelled with their suitcase to the spot on the other side of the room, where I asked them to unpack. While unpacking I asked them to identify the items that were ‘left behind’ and then we would pretend play, returning to find them and then did it over again a few times, with each child taking turns pulling the suitcase.

This activity had them inspired to keep playing so off they went to play ‘trip.’ It was great fun!

Houseboat

There was so much packed into this day that even splitting the activities over two days we still didn’t get through everything.

Sink or Float:

I made the kids sorting mats and had them each take a zip lock bags to collect 5 things that they wanted to test in the water.

They had so much fun testing things they could find to see if they would float or sink. This little assignments had the kids practicing their skills at making predictions and sorting items once they had been tested. I love Science. We talked about skills a good scientist would have and talked about the word hypothesis (as idea you can test). The kids had a tendency to rush through and want to just dump everything in the water but I tried to slow them down to make a prediction for each item and then explain why, in order to form a hypothesis. Then sort their items into two categories after: floats, does not float.

Don’t Sink the Boat:

Guaranteed this activities will have your littles building, exploring and counting. I gave the kids some tin foil and had them construct boats out of it. Our science card asked us to use coins, but I rarely have change around so we pulled out our counting bunny manipulatives from our Growing Gardens unit to put in their boats. The bunnies were a fun alternative because the kids had to work to balance their boats and keep their bunnies from falling out. We counted the bunnies as we put them in seeing how many we could pack in before our boats sank. The kids couldn’t get enough of this . Our tub of water, bunnies and tin foil boats have been a station that we have left out on the deck for the rest of the week and the kids enjoy launching their boats and bunnies.

Our water station out on the deck

 Thanks for stopping by

Good bye

Disclosure: I receive Mother Goose Time Curriculum free of charge for educational purposes in return for posting my honest experiences using the curriculum. Photos of children featured on my blog for review of Mother Goose Time are used with signed consent of the child's parents. I welcome any questions or concerns.