Letter M - Monkey Week

These are our homeschool preschool activities for the Letter M and Monkeys week. Archer was 32 months. You can see our full "curriculum" post here, but we will only use some activities each week. The majority of his time is still unstructured play.

This was his desk setup. I hung some bulletin board letters, a sign language card (from And Next Comes L) and his work from the week. The shelf had a letter construction capital and lowercase letters, an Alphabet Reader, a Meet the Phonics Letter Reader and a wooden letter train car.

I'm trying to include readers to read together, as well as books about the week's letter or animal. We had a First Little Readers book, and a non-fiction sight words reader. We also had seeral monkey books.

There were his shelves for the week. I used Magnatiles to make an M on his white board and added some magnetic letters and fridge phonics. On top I have his Alphabet Soup Can, some monkeys, and his preschool basket.

Shelves on the left had a monkey stacking game, Monkey Around, magnetic gears and a safari bowling set. Shelves on the right had Rainforest Toob figurines and vocabulary cards, a 12 piece puzzle, Magna Quibix, a silicone letter "popping" toy, Barrel of Monkeys, cars and garages, block buddies and a basket of cars.

Letter construction (From Tired Need Sleep)

Letter maze (free to print here). He completed it correctly, then colored all over it.

Tracing cards and line tracing (free to print here).

Cut and Paste Phonics Hunt.

We did our normal playdough routine with cookie cutters and a  letter stamper (similar to these).  We also used our alphabet dough mat (free to print here).

Beginner spelling cards.

M and Monkey puzzles

Making letters on our Cuisenaire Alphabet Cards using wooden Cuisenaire Rods

Matching monkeys to shape words (free to print here).

Monkey with magnetic pattern blocks on our magnetic easel.

Monkey size sorting (free to print here).

Stacking some monkeys (and apes).

Rainforest Toob figurines and vocabulary cards.

Tracing pages from Tracing Trails. We use dry erase crayons so we can do it again and again. These were actually big brother's.

Safari bowling!

Playing Monkey Around

Writing numbers in his sand box (DIY post here)

His froggy balance is currently used multiple times a week, sometimes to do math! 

Gears (Lakeshore Learning) on his magnetic easel were used a lot this week!

Meet the Math Facts are new favorite apps.

Stringing monkeys! He's not ready to use the string to pick up new ones, but enjoyed balancing them.

Combining his favorite things: trains and a number mold.

Lately, he's been stealing big brother's Katmino game. He loves fitting the pieces together in different ways. 

See other Alphabet Posts:

Cuisenaire Alphabet Cards

 

I've been looking for more ways to incorporate Cuisenaire Rods into our preschool activities. Since we're working on Alphabet Themes, making alphabet templates seemed like a perfect fit.

I made both colored templates and black and white ones, but we're using the black and white ones.

Print the Cuisenaire Alphabet Cards Here 

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Valentine's Preschool Activities

We're still doing some theme weeks instead of our normal Alphabet Themes. This week we did Valentine's Day themed activities. I do not force Archer to do things, so I often will present him with an activity that he rejects. I try not to take it personally! 😂

I put some of our Valentine's Day books on his shelf. Happy Love Day Daniel Tiger was, by far, the favorite. I liked The Littlest Cupid because the main character was named Archie.

I set out some red play dough with heart gems, cookie cutters and a heart extruder.

Using Valentine's Cuisenaire Rod templates. He was good at finding the right rods, but needed a lot of help holding them in place as he added new ones (he tended to push things around). He also really enjoyed tallying up how many of each rod we used for me to record on the bottom.

I found these great Valentine's pattern block templates at Playdough to Plato. He likes adding the pattern blocks, but needs a lot of help keeping things from sliding around.

I gave him some colored paper and a heart paper punch and he enjoyed making tiny hearts. He did not feel like gluing them onto anything.

I made a big tub of soap foam (2T dish soap, 1/4 c water on high in a mixer) for him to play in. I threw in some hearts and his resin letters. On the side I had a bowl of clean water (which I had to keep replacing), a towel and molds for the hearts/letters to go into. He played for a long, long time. My floor was wet and soapy, his pants were pink, but he loved it.

10s Frame with acrylic hearts and lips.

I gave him some heart numbers and his place value blocks (he still requests these frequently). I had him put the numbers in order and he added tens to several of them before losing interest.

Very short lived coffee filter craft. I had to finish it for him, but he liked the end result.

Organizing words into sentences (printable here). He did pretty well, so I think I need to do more of this kind of activity.

Same idea making words. We haven't really attempted much spelling, so I really had no expectations. He did well. Although, this is not the same as generating his own letters. He definitely would have forgotten the e's on the end.

A Valentine's sensory bin had purple popcorn kernels, acrylic hearts and diamonds and little heart erasers on which I wrote the alphabet. Anything with letters is automatically more appealing to him.

We got out some felt envelopes I made him. He matched the shapes to the shapes on the stamps.

We also played Frankie's Food Truck Fiasco (according to his own rules)

He had been requesting a number mold, so I made some resin numbers to go in it. Unfortunately, the numbers do not stand up on their own. Playdough to the rescue!