Play and Learn with Mama: Fire Truck Snack

This was such a simple, sweet little treat - way more sugar that they are ever allowed, but hence the word 'treat'!! This is our version of a Fire Engine snack I first saw here.

We used a lovely home-baked bread that my husband made the night before, as well as..

Strawberry Jam

Mini Shortbread cookies for the engine's window

Chocolate covered cookie rings for the wheels (the original used Oreos)

A glace cherry for the red light

Pretzel sticks for the ladder

I had prepared an example beforehand, and placed all the little bits and pieces on individual plates for the Little Joyfuls to build their own engines.

Delight!!

Play and Learn with Mama: Fire Fighter Lap Book

   I have been meaning to do a few weeks of Play and Learn activities with a community helpers theme for a while now, so when a mom in our local home schooler's group recently arranged a visit to the fire station, it was the perfect opportunity to jump right in with some fun activities!

   We started with a very simple lap book:

For the cover I printed a paper doll and fire fighter outfit from Making Friends. I coloured and cut it out for Sweetpea the night before, and she then had fun 'dressing' her fire fighter in the correct sequence.

  The next day we revised the order in which a fire fighter dresses for a fire emergency by discussing this picture I printed from here . I had made an extra copy, and Sweetpea then glued the pictures in the correct sequence into a mini book.

  We also had lots of giggles as we practiced Stopping, Dropping and Rolling, after we had discussed this picture, also from the resource above. (Click here.)

  There are some amazing free fire fighter printables available online, but since most of them are English, I designed and laminated a few of my own. Carissa over at 1+1+1=1 has a great post full of tips on how to create your own printables for lap books and tot packs. You can check it out here. Ours included:

  Size Sorting:

  Counting from 1 to 5:

  Letter practice:

 Pre-writing exercises and Matching pairs (and learning some interesting new words in the process!):

{Note: I will gladly e-mail you these printables to you if you're interested - just leave me a comment.}

  I also laminated these pages I printed out from Club Fire Facts.

I cut off the top of a manila envelope and glued it to the back cover of our lap book to keep the laminated pages together.

Play and Learn with Mama: Disney's Cars theme - Learning activities

   A large part of our Cars inspired playing and learning from last week was inspired by the lovely tot book and preschool pack I downloaded from www.1plus1plus1equals1.com (You can read more about our other Cars inspired activities here, and watch this space for more posts later this week)

  I laminated most of the pages for durability so that we can use them again for the younger siblings in years to come, and I keep them with all our other lap books in a file.

For this counting activity we used our Unifix cubes to practice one-to-one correspondence. I didn't want to interrupt the learning that was taking place, so no picture of that, sorry.

I turned the Cars Shapes three-part cards from the Tot Book into a file folder game which both children enjoyed playing: Arrow just matched shapes and colours, while Sweetpea also matched the names of the shapes by identifying the first letters.

We used the Cars Colours cards for a quick scavenger hunt (I was making dinner and this was a lovely little activity to keep the little ones occupied while I was busy!)

I also added some home-made activities using junk mail, a few cheap sticker sheets, and one Disney magazine I bought at the supermarket last week. 

This page from a junk mail add is glued on the back of our lap book. I asked Sweetpea to colour in all the 9's she saw on the page.

Sensory matching cars. They had great fun with these and we played with them a few times during the week. I blind-folded the children, handed them a card, and they had to find its match from the ones spread out in front of them. The textures are (clockwise from top left): tulle, tin foil, sandpaper, corrugated board and polar fleece.

This was from the magazine - I laminated the page and Sweetpea had to circle the differences with her dry erase marker.

Practicing to draw straight lines - stickers, hand-drawn 'roads', laminated.

A mini book to go in the lap book. Sweetpea glued down pictures cut  from junk mail and I 'interviewed' her with questions like: "If you could have a car of your own, what colour would it be?" (Red, of course!!), "Where would go in your car?" and  "Who would you take with you?"

Sweetpea knows the days of the week, but we are working on sequencing and the order of events at the moment, and this Days of the Week Highway was a great tool for talking about what comes before and after, what happened two days ago, etc. This is not a great picture, sorry! Each of the cones has the name of the day of the week written on it, and every morning after breakfast the children moved the picture of Lightning McQueen (cut from the magazine and laminated) one day forward. We are now using it for a second week, since ArrowBoy is really enjoying this and sings a days-of-the-week song every time we do it!

Play and Learn with Mama: Disney's Cars theme

   Right-o, so by now it should be a well-known fact that we are seriously loving Lightning McQueen of Disney's Cars fame around here. So when I recently saw that Carissa from 1plus1plus1equals1 has a Cars tot book and preschool pack, I knew Sweetpea would just love learning with Mr McQueen! I also added a few activities of my own, and we ended up having a very merry week of playing and learning. I'll be sharing what we got up to in a short series of posts.

Cardboard Cars

   First the little ones had to each have a car of their own, so two boxes from my recyclables stash were converted into box cars. Initially they just sat around in them making car noises, but then Sweetpea became annoyed that they couldn't move, so I cut out the bottoms, and then the race was on!

The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above-average drivers. - Dave Barry, comedian

   ArrowBoy fetched his old vacuum hose (quite possibly his all-time favourite toy, apart from a real, noisy vacuum cleaner!), stuck one end into an empty garden pot, and used it as the nozzle of his petrol pump! It also doubled as a means of pumping up the tires!!

Life is too short for traffic.

- Dan  Bellack

Giving his car a good scrub!

'Stay tuned' for some more Cars inspired fun in the next few posts!

Play and Learn with Mama - Handa's Surprise Part 2

The highlight of our week of activities inspired by the beautiful book Handa's Surprise, had to have been the day we made a Handa Fruit Salad!

We used the book itself as our recipe book and added the ingredients according to the order in the story.

All the fruit mentioned in the book. Guavas were the only fruit that weren't in season, so we used the tinned variety.

We practiced peeling...

...slicing...

...scooping...

...some more slicing...

...another kind of scooping...

...and more peeling. (Please notice the empty chair in the background  - our littlest helper  went MIA halfway through the salad making!)

And the best part was enjoying the fruit of our labour in the garden! (The kikoi they sat on is another treasure I bought during a trip to Kenya a few years ago)

The next day we used the left over fruit to make delicious smoothies for a snack time treat.

There was also...

transferring scented wooden fruit using an ice tongs...

transferring smaller fruit and veggies with another kind of tongs...

and we made beautiful 'stained glass' fruit from tissue and contact paper!

And finally...we visited the Mooiberge Strawberry Farm just outside Stellenbosch and although we were not able to pick our own berries, the children loved the bright and cheery junk sculptures and scarecrows in the play area!!