Preschool Week 2, day 3

On this day, Oliver wanted to wear his Melissa and Doug construction vest down for school time. He had his hammers too at the table! I think he had three or four at one point but was content with the two (one for each hand) while working. We went outside for our weather check and I love this shot of him gleefully looking up into the sky at the sunshine. Oh sweet boy!
He then counted to 11 back inside and proudly found the number 11 on the calendar (that wasn't the date, but anything that encourages counting is great!)

We were working on day 5 of creation, fish and birds. I spent some time the night before going through magazines for pictures of birds and fish. I cut them out, and on a big sheet of construction paper wrote "fish" and "birds" on separate halves with a line drawn down the middle (I added in clouds and water lines later to help Oliver understand what went where). Oliver sorted through the pictures and places them on the right sides. He loves to search for things and complete puzzles, so this was a lot of fun for him.
A side note: I like to save the materials I make, even though they are so simple (um, also I need to get a laminator for these things) so that I can either use again later, or re-purpose. I thought that I could even use these images for sequencing later, having him sort the size from smallest to largest.

After sorting, we did a little painting with watercolors. I drew day five with fishes and birds for him on a piece of paper with the number 5 on it and he painted it in his choice of paint colors. Lots of green going on here!

After paints we worked on color finding. Oliver already knows his colors so I thought a recognition game would be fun for him. While I was searching for fish and bird pictures I cut out pictures that were just pretty or interesting with color in them. I laid these out and gave Oliver one color of felt pom poms (I picked up a bag of assorted colors at the dollar store) and had him find that color in the pictures. It was a good searching game for him to look at details and take his time. Some pictures only had a little bit of that color so he had to focus on it. He liked this game a lot! We ended the day with some more writing practice with his dry erase marker and worksheets. It was a good school day, we seemed to get a lot in!