If You Take a Mouse to the Movies

I wanted to share some resources that I refer to when planning lessons. At BSU, I am continuously aligning state standards in my lesson plans. This same technique is used to align preschool indicators in the weekly themes. The focus in early childhood includes small and large muscle development, social development as well as emergent literacy and math/ science skills. I utilize the Creative Curriculum developmental continuum in order to meet these goals as well as a balance of activities to learn letter and number concepts. I also look at ideas from Montessori programs to provide self-correcting activities, literacy ideas and activities that assist in developing real-life skills. My goal is to provide activities that address the needs of all of our learning styles and meet the needs of whole child instruction.

This week, we focused our activities around If You Take a Mouse to the Movies by Laura Numeroff and illustrated by Felicia Bond. I decided to work around the ideas in the book, which included popcorn, a movie theater, snow and Christmas decorations. Here are some of the activities from the week:

We had a great time measuring and pouring popcorn into the popcorn containers. We also popped the popcorn in an air popper without the lid on to watch the popcorn not only pop but also to count the kernels that fell within our circles on the mat.

I also created a movie theater space in our playroom complete with empty candy boxes, popcorn containers, tickets and money.

For our literacy work, we used items from the book to make our own story as well as the word cards found here.

For math, we counted popcorn, created patterns from our Christmas erasers and matched the number with these printables found here. I also used the candy canes to create a matching folder game and we also made patterns with printable cards and paper clips.

Our science and sensory experiences included new discovery bottles with Christmas ribbon or glitter items, Christmas sensory bins and cloud dough.

Art experiences also included sensory as well as we painted with bows and added food colors to shaving cream to create a marbleized effect on our trees.

The children really seemed to enjoy this theme and the imaginary play extended into other activities. We also worked on the songs we are preparing for our Christmas open house on Thursday, December 20 at 4p.m.

I will leave you with a fun video from the Wiggles that we used with our theme this week.