Preschool at the Griffins

Last week we hosted the Ladera Learners at our house for the first time.  I am scheduled to host May and have already started planning, so I had to be a lot quicker getting ready in two weeks for December!

Circle Time Board

Preschool Tables

For our first week, I decided I wanted to do a preschooler friendly service project.  I contacted the Ronald McDonald house about their pop top houses.  They were so wonderful and mailed them to me to avoid an extra drive to Orange.  We prefolded all of the houses so they would be ready for the kids.  Sadly, I was too busy to get pictures of the kids doing the activity, but it was a hit!  Most of the kids dumped the pop tops and did it several times!   We hope to keep this going at our house, although we don't really drink soda anymore.  

Since we had the little houses, I went with house/home as a theme.  Our sancks were little houses! :)

Snack time is always popular!  After snack, we did our craft/ activity.  We cut out family members and houses out of felt.  Each child picked out the members of their household and stuck them on the house.  It was really interesting to see how the kids view their families.  For example, most of the kids with a baby sibling put the baby with mommy.  (The exception being Colin, who put the baby with daddy.)  We actually had so much fun with the felt, that I think we are going to get Colin a little felt board for Christmas.  

We made a patch of playdoh for Colin birthday party and it was fun and the kids really enjoyed it so I decided to make up a second patch for the party.  I didn't like how the first one smelled, so I added lavendar essential oil to the second patch.  It came out awesome! The kids had a good time laying with it.

We closed with Three Bill Goats Fluff and our circle time songs.

It took a lot more energy than I had anticipated, but the kids did great and we had so much fun!