Preschool Treasure Maps

Well, this turned out to be a little bit of work on my part, but it was my own fault.  I was trying to be lazy, but my four year old would not have it.

He really likes maps so we checked out the book   Follow That Map!: A First Book of Mapping Skills from the library.  This is a great introduction to all kinds of maps and the features of maps.  A group of children loses their cat and dog and go looking for them using a variety of maps, asking the reader questions along the way.

Here comes the part where I don't look so good.  Drew's favorite map was the treasure map and he really wanted to do a project with a treasure map.  (Sometimes I just curse myself for coming up with such crazy fun projects. Sigh.)  I am almost always up for a good project, but this was Sunday morning.  Early Sunday morning. And I could not be described as a morning person.  I briefly thought about making one of our letter treasure maps, but I thought I could pacify him with printing off a treasure map to color.  There's lots online but I used one I found on Spoonful.

Do I even need to tell you that this was not going to cut it?  This is the point when I thought, this kid is driving me crazy.  He needs to burn off some energy.  I'll modify the map so he has to move around a lot.  And once I had started that I figured why not add some letter recognition in there since I was already off the couch anyway?

I made some construction paper cut-outs that said things like, "Take 10 big steps.  Find A in the dining room." and "Do 20 jumping jacks.  Find B in the kitchen." (See how I snuck some counting practice in there too?  Sneaky, aren't I?) 

I stuck these to the map.

I also made 3 letters for each room.  I put a smiley face on the back of the correct letter.

Then I hid them:

My two year old stayed interested for about 4 letters, but Drew did the whole thing and then did it all again.  It didn't hurt that the last stop had two chocolate/gold coins.  What's a treasure map if it doesn't lead to treasure?

Linking to Tuesday Tots, Learn Through Play, Cheerios & Lattes, Sharing Saturday, The Sunday Showcase, Show and Share Saturday, Link & Learn, Delicate Construction, Learning Laboratory, Book Sharing Monday, Tip Junkie. Nap Time Creations, It's Playtime!, Mom on Timeout, True Aim, Sun Scholars, TGIF, Tatertots and Jello, One Creative Mommy. Crayon Freckles' Pirate Link Up

5 Ways to Celebrate Ice Cream Month Preschool Style

July is National Ice Cream Month and we're such big fans that we've been celebrating all month year long. 

1. Make some Ice Cream Sandwich Sharks

Or you could do ladybug ice cream sandwiches.  I don't have a post on this since they're pretty self-explanatory. The spots are chocolate chips and the eyes are of the DIY variety. (You can tell by the charming, ah, imperfection of them.) We read the book Ladybugs: Red, Fiery, and Bright to go with this.

2. Get some Math & Literacy Practice

3.  Enjoy some sensory play with Ice Cream Play Dough

4.  Create some Curious George Ice Cream Cones

5.  Read some Books!
Should I Share My Ice Cream? (An Elephant and Piggie Book): Gerald gets an ice cream cone and spends so long agonizing over whether or not to share it with Piggie that it melts.  Understandably upset about this, Gerald feels that he's blown it.  Fortunately, Piggie comes along with just the thing.


Simply Delicious!:  A father buys a "double-dip-chocolate-chip-and-cherry ice cream with rainbow twinkles and chopped nut sprinkles" for his son.  He must ride his bike home to deliver it, so he decides to take a shortcut through the jungle.  One by one, different animals spot the ice cream cone and chase Mr. Minky, who cleverly avoids them.  By the time he's safely home there is a string of animals following including butterflies, a toucan, a spider monkey, a tiger and a crocodile.  But now the animals are so hungry, they turn on each other!


Spike and Cubby's Ice Cream Island Adventure: Spike and Cubby are two dogs that work together to write books.  Spike talks Cubby into a visit to Ice Cream Island for the Spumoni Baloney Grande.  Unfortunately, getting to the island proves to be a challenge and Spike and Cubby brave a terrible storm before they get their reward!


Ice Cream: The Full Scoop: A nonfiction book with facts about ice cream.  This was a little long for my preschooler, but he was still interested.  Probably better suited for elementary age kids.


Ice Cream Cones for Sale is also a great book for older readers about the debate over who invented the first ice cream cone.  A fun mix of fiction and nonfiction, this book has wonderful illustrations, humor, and a mystery.

Linking to Delicate Construction, Learning Laboratory, The Gunny Sack. TCB, Tip Junkie, Tuesday Tots, Ginger Snap Crafts, The Sunday Showcase

Mission Possible (Book Giveaway)

The winner is Adriane!  Please contact me at loriesk at msn.com so I can get your book shipped.  Thanks to everybody who entered.  I wish I could give everybody a copy.

When I had the opportunity to read Mission Possible: How the Secrets of the Success Academies Can Work in Any School I was intrigued.  As a teacher, parent, and former student, I feel deeply invested in our educational system.  As a reading specialist, Eva Moskowitz and Ana Lavinia had me in the introduction when they wrote, "we believe that literacy is the key to learning."

This book takes you on a tour of the Success Academies and shows you THINK literacy in action.  Eva Moskowitz, founder and CEO of the Success Academy Charter Schools, and Ana Lavinia, designer and developer of THINK literacy, understand the challenges teachers and principals face.  Using the strategies outlined in the book the first Success Academy Charter School quickly emerged as one of the top performing schools in New York State.

A few of the differences between traditional public schools and the Success Academies that the book describes in detail are class length, extra time available for struggling students, the pace and rigor, expectations for students and staff, and a foundation in THINK literacy.

But what stood out to me as the biggest difference between traditional public schools and the Success Academies is the extensive time, energy, and funds that go into educating the adults in the building.  They believe that success starts with the adults and there are high expectations placed on teachers.  There is also constant support, training, and feedback.  Their professional development system includes things like the Cycle of Teacher Improvement and T School, a four week teacher training program.

This last point struck me because as a teacher, it can be hard to admit that you can't help every student simply because you don't know how.  I was asked to respond to the prompt, Stagnation, being unable to accomplish one's job at a high level, is one of the greatest sources of low teacher morale.  Why does this country treat teaching so differently than it does other professions?  I think it's because good teachers make their jobs look easy.  As a student, it's impossible to understand what goes into every lesson a teacher prepares, even the ones that don't go well.  The authors of the book have pointed out that teaching is a skill and art that needs to be continually developed.  The results from the Success Academies certainly suggest that the authors know what they're talking about.

This book is a valuable resource for teachers, principals, parents, education reformers, or anyone who cares about America's schools and students.

Want your own copy?  It's easy!  To enter, just leave a comment on this post.

I'll choose a random number on August 2.  If I don't hear from the winner within 48 hours, I'll choose a new winner.  Good luck and thanks so much for entering!  (Sorry, U.S. residents only.)

This is a sponsored post. All opinions are mine.

Kid's Co-op: 5 Ways to Play with Sand and Mud (including making your own!)

There's nothing my kids like more than making a mess and last week's Kid's Co-op was full of great ideas for messy sensory play!  Check out these fun ways to play with mud and sand (even if you don't have any mud or sand.  These ladies are that awesome!):

1.  Little Moments used moon sand to create a mini beach.
2.  Famiglia and Seoul used good old-fashioned dirt and water to make this pig pen.
3. No dirt?  Frogs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails used some stale coffee to make sand and mud.
4.  No stale coffee?  Play through the day shares how to make coffee sand with used coffee grounds.
5.  Wondering what your children are getting from all this?  Check out the post at JDaniel4's Mom about the learning that takes place during this kind of sensory play.

A great book to go along with these activities is Mud! It has short rhyming text, so it's perfect for toddlers and beginning readers.  A boy slowly gets covered with mud and then is joined by his friends until they're all covered.  The adorable illustrations make this a really fun book and we love looking for all the little animals that are also getting covered in mud.

I've pinned these to the Kid's Co-op Pinterest Board (and you can find a featured button on my buttons page if you'd like one.)

Thanks so much to everybody who linked up last week!  Can't wait to see what you've got this week!
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Summer vs. Winter Olympics Activity (And the Easiest Gold Medals EVER)

While looking at the book G is for Gold Medal: An Olympics Alphabet, I was explaining the difference between the summer and winter Olympics to my preschooler.  We were deciding which events in the book took place at the winter or summer Olympics.  To make it more fun, we did a movement activity. 

I set up a summer area and a winter area. 

As we went through the book again, I'd point at an athlete participating in an event, and my kids would tell me if it was winter or summer, run to the appropriate area and pantomime playing the sport. 

Here they are under the "snow" pretending to play hockey, which I guess actually does look an awful lot like fighting.

They did so well that they earned chocolate coins taped to strings gold medals!

Linking to It's Playtime!, Kid's Co-op, Sun Scholars, The Sunday Showcase, Link & Learn

6 Things You're Already Doing to Help Your Child Become a Better Reader

We parents often don't give ourselves enough credit.  We are teaching our kids all the time.  Even when we don't realize it.  For example, the other day I overheard my two year old tell my four year old that he was pissing her off.  I'll have to tell my husband to watch his language.  Ahem.  Anyway...

In consideration of the bajillion things we parents do, and the bajillion more on our to-do lists, let's focus on all the great things we're already doing.  Here are six ways you are teaching your child to be a great reader, maybe without even realizing it:

3 ways you're improving reading skills while reading:

1.  Self-Corrections - Even those of us who have been reading for more years than we care to admit make mistakes while reading.  We pause when it stops making sense, backtrack, and reread that sentence or section, usually without taking much notice.  When this happens while we're reading aloud to our children, they learn that reading is more than reciting words.  It's about making meaning.  They also learn that even adults make mistakes while reading, but they monitor those mistakes and go back and correct them (if meaning loss has occurred).

2.  Prosody - When they hear us read with expression and enthusiasm, our children learn that there is a story inside those books worth finding out.  We also model what fluent readers sound like.

3.  Modeling - Of course it's great if your kids see you reading a book, magazine, or novel.  But even if you don't have time (or don't want to) they see you reading a menu at a restaurant or the directions to put together a toy.  It teaches them the essentialness (is that a word?) of reading and all the different purposes for it.

3 ways you're improving reading skills when you're not even reading:

4. Background Knowledge - Any trip to the zoo, grocery store, or even backyard is teaching your child about the world around them and expanding their vocabulary, both essential for successful reading.

5.  Connections - Good readers make text to self connections, text to text connections, and text to world connections.  Anytime you make a comment like, "Hey, there's a truck like the one in your favorite book!" or "Let's get this book about bears because you really liked the last one we got about bears," you are teaching your child how to make those connections.

6.  Drawing Conclusions - Ever played a guessing game with your children?  You thought of an object and they either had to ask questions or you gave clues to help them figure out what you were thinking of?  What you were actually doing was working on their inferencing skills.

So for these reasons (and so many, many more) give yourself a big pat on the back, you're doing a great job of raising a life long reader!

Linking to Ginger Snap Crafts, It's Playtime!, Mom on Timeout,  Kid's Co-op, Happy Hour Projects, Sun Scholars, Cheerios & Lattes, Crafy Moms Share, Tatertots and Jello, Family Ever After, The Sunday Showcase, Link & Learn, Tuesday Tots, Tip-toe Thru Tuesday

Dissolving Rocks

We recently checked out the Kids' Guide to Building Cool Stuff from the library.  It's got eleven fun projects that kids can do.  When my four year old pages through it he says, "Can we do that?!" for almost every one.  The projects are fairly easy to do and don't require anything too fancy, but mostly they are FUN!  The results of most of the activities are impressive enough that it would hold the interest of an older child but not so complex that preschoolers can't make a significant contribution to them.  This book would make a great gift for those boys that are hard to buy for.  The only critisim I have is that they didn't really include the scientific explanation and when you've got a four year old always wanting to know why, that comes in pretty handy!

As a surprise I made my kiddos the Fizzle Rocks from the book.  To say that they loved it would be an understatement.  And the only things you need are baking soda, water, food coloring, and vinegar.  And surprises to hide inside. 

To make dissolving "rocks", start by making a dough from baking soda, water, and food coloring.  Start with one cup baking soda and a quarter cup of water and adjust from there.  I didn't even measure the second batch.  You want it moldable but not so wet that it won't hold its shape. 

Roll your dough around some surprises.  I used some small plastic frogs I picked up in the party favor section.  When I ran out of those, I started using coins.

Allow your rocks to dry overnight.

When the rocks are hard, fill a clear bowl with vinegar (we actually mixed ours with water) and drop them in!

The kids really liked it, and then when they realized there were surprises in there they LOVED it.

We've also done the balloon rocket from the book:

and the water bridge:

and making butter:

The vinegar launcher is next on our list!

If you liked this post, you might want to check out our cloud experiment too!

Linking to Delicate Construction, Learning Laboratory, Tuesday Tots, Kids Get Crafty, Capri +3, It's Playtime!, Kid's Co-op, Fun Sparks, Sun Scholars, TGIF, Cheerios & Lattes, The Sunday Showcase, Show and Share Saturday, Link & Learn