The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Every night, after Ladybug and Rocket Boy have showered (or bathed) are in their pajamas and snuggled up in bed, their Daddy reads them a couple of chapters from a book. 

A week ago they finished reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I asked Rocket Boy what happened in the book. 

"Dorothy gets, inside her house gets picked up by a cyclone and she gets transported to the land of Oz.  Then Dorothy meets the good witch and kills the bad witch and then she meets the munchkins who live in the munchkins land.  She travels on the yellow brick road and meets scarecrow, lion and the tin woodsman.  They go off to the emerald city where the great wizard of oz is, then they have to kill the wicked witch of the west. 

With water they melted the wicked witch of the west. 

The wizard of Oz went up in the balloon without Dorothy,  Dorothy really really really really wanted to go up in the balloon. 

The guard with the green whiskers told Dorothy and her friends to go to the country of the quadlings, that's when Dorothy used her sliver slippers to teleport back to Kansas after the good witch told her. That was the most powerful witch of all. 

That's all, that's the end of the story. "

I also asked Ladybug and she said

"I liked Dorothy and she had a dog"

We also had a couple of days of themed work which the kids really enjoyed.  We used the Wizard of Oz Preschool Pack from Homeschool Creations 

I got Rocket Boy to cut up this picture of the Tin Woodsman then glue it in order on some plain paper.

Rocket Boy wrote the names of each character, with a little help with spelling. 

Rocket Boy read a short story and then had the find and circle each word on the second sheet. 

Ladybug had to circle the odd one out, she needed help with this one, our printer is very low on ink so some of the differences were hard to spot.

Ladybug rolled dice and graphed the results.  She LOVED this activity and completed it twice, once with the Do a Dots, and again with stickers.

Ladybug is great at tracing, years ahead of her brother at the same age. 

Rocket Boy had to cut out the characters and glue them on the sheet in a pattern that he choose. 

Rocket Boy had to draw a line from the picture to the name. 

Both Ladybug and Rocket Boy had a go at this puzzle, both needed help.  Photo by Ladybug.

I'm new to using these cards, I've always skipped printing these when doing packs with Rocket Boy when he was younger.  I still don't know the 'correct' way to use these, but used them as a talking point with Ladybug and matching the pictures and words.

Ladybug LOVES colouring so I was printing more and more pages for her throughout the day. 

Rocket Boy had to put the correct fractions in Glenda the Good witches wand to complete the pictures. 

Tinkerbell Preschool Pack

One of the blogs I follow, 1 + 1 + 1 = 1 posted a free preschool printable based on the Disney character, Tinker Bell.  Ladybug is a fan of Tinker Bell so I quickly added the pack to my long list of things I want to do with Ladybug.

As Rocket Boy has sports group every Thursday afternoon I thought this pack would be a good way to keep Ladybug occupied and happy as she wasn't allowed to join in.  I rushed around that morning getting it printed, laminated and cut ready for the afternoon.  I also made some rainbow play dough, and packed up some cotton buds (q tips) paints, white board markers, and some of the preschool pack ready to keep Ladybug busy.

It worked really well.  She was very keen to do all of the activities I packed.  We didn't get it all done in just the one afternoon, after all sports group is only an hour long.  I also hadn't managed to get everything ready that morning around helping Rocket Boy with his morning work as well.  So I let her stay home from kindy the next day and we completed as much as we could that morning.

Here are some of the photos of Ladybug hard at work.

Play dough mat

Cotton bud painting.

Tracing with white board markers on laminated pages, Ladybug is getting really good at tracing letters and really enjoys doing this, it may be due to all the praise I give her, or just something she enjoys.

 

Marking the odd one out.

The next day, graphing.

Stamping all the T or t's to get Tinker Bell to her friends

Stamping 1 - 20 again to get Tinker Bell to her friends.  Ladybug needed me to point out the numbers for her to stamp.

Shapes, I precut these for her and she glued them on.

Puzzle, as Ladybug hasn't learnt her numbers yet, I only cut this into 5 pieces rather than 10.

There were many other activities Ladybug completed but I try not to have a camera in her face all day long :)

Star Wars

We had a fun family day filled with Star Wars yesterday.  When hunting through some old boxes I found some preschool packs I prepared so long ago that I forgot about them.  Rocket Boy took one look at the Star Wars pack and wanted to start right away.

I made a deal with Rocket Boy, if he completed everything I asked him to out of the pack we could watch the last Star Wars movie he had yet to see, Episode III Revenge of the Sith.  This really motivated him and he was very impatience and didn’t even want to wait for me to have breakfast or get dressed before we started, tuff luck my boy, this Mumma needs food and a shower first.

I found this pack at Homeschool Creations.  One of the many sites out there thh have a huge amount of free resources you can use with your children.  It only costs you paper, ink and if you want lamination pockets.

Rocket Boy was very keen for me to take photos of everything so I could share ‘on the internet with your friends Mum’  I also had to email Poppa to make sure he saw it as well.

Below you can see Rocket boy circling the first letter of each name of the characters, this was great for pre writing and phonics. Sorting pictures of characters with shapes on them onto a card with the name of the shapes, Rocket Boy did this buy sounding out the start of the word to work out what shape it was.  Then there was some pre writing exercises and measuring the light savers, keep in mind we use the metric system in New Zealand so the measurements are in centimetres.

Ladybug had to join in so she had a go at most things but really enjoyed wiping off the whiteboard pens off the laminated cards.

Several different activities here, the shape one again (opps didn’t realise I put that in twice) and some handwriting, as you’ll know from earlier posts, Rocket Boy does not like handwriting, but was happy to do this activity (most likely he was thinking of the movie at the end).  We only did the uppercase page as the Handwriting without Tears program starts with uppercase first so it’s what he knows.  I did have to write some of the letters for him on another page first but he did every letter on that page himself and even correctly formed each one as well.  The Yoda and Darth Vader pages were just tracing the letters but still good practise.  Spot the different, and patterning.  And last, I would place a number on the card and Rocket Boy would place the correct number of star ships.

Rocket Boy was not happy with his first attempt at the letter E and did not want this shared this picture so I made sure I took a photo of his second attempt which is below.

Rocket Boy had a LOT of fun this with pack, and even Ladybug stayed at table the whole time with us.  Ladybug is showing more and more readiness to start some work of her own so if I get myself organised you’ll be seeing some new preschool posts featuring my little Ladybug soon.