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Welcome back to Latticed Learning! This year, we're continuing to learn while we play - repeating many of our favorites from the past while adding in all sorts of new activities as well.
This day's post is devoted to our weekly themes - some weeks have more activities than others, but each lesson will be fun for you to explore with your little one!
Read All About It
Books about fruit, about veggies, about eating -- basically anything related to food were fair game for this week and I even included in Johnny Appleseed and other apple-y stories, as well.
Here were just a few of our favorites:
A Crazy Day at the Critter Cafe is fun to read. The story rhymes well, the illustrations are cool and remind me of this book, and there are all sorts of kooky animals filling the pages.
Sitting Down to Eat has great repetition, animals, a silly ending, and will probably remind you of this story.
Today is Monday and The Very Hungry Caterpillar - two classics that I'm sure everyone is familiar with.
Out to Lunch is a silly book showing what happens when a frog tries to mind his manners at a fancy restaurant.
Froggy Bakes a Cake is not only full of silliness, but you'll find that onomatopoeia graces almost every page, making it fun not only for the listener, but the one reading it aloud, as well!
Gregory the Terrible Eater is a hilarious book about a goat who disappoints his parents by only eating things like fruits and vegetables, instead of their "healthy" diet of trash and old shoes.
Socks for Supper
Growing Vegetable Soup
Pumpkin Pumpkin
Bear and Bunny Grow Tomatoes
Feast for 10
Jamberry
What Am I
Blueberries for Sal
Froggy Eats Out
Apples
The Berenstain Bears Go Out to Eat
There are a ton of fun food cartoons out there, but I think Gv's favorites were this Berenstein Bears episode as well as this one from Super Why.
We planted seeds (saved from the tomatoes and peppers in the previous night's salad) in a little container out in the yard.
We looked through a grocery ad that came in the mail one day, pointing out the different foods we saw and then cutting and gluing them into groups by food type, which turned into Gv creating menus and meals for us for the entire week.
We played with Gv's cool felt food and her other play kitchen toys (ours was a hand-me-down, but it's kind of like this one).
I created a fruit and veggie matching game for Gv. I put all sorts of cute clip art graphics on a page and printed them out in color, then printed another set in black and white. I had her point out the matches between the two sheets, then told her to use the same colors to color in the pictures on the black and white page. Then we cut out each picture, spread them all out, and had her find the matches, naming each one as she did. I used clip art from my favorite Print Shop software to do this, so I can't share it due to copyright reasons, but you can find a similar one that looks really fantastic here.
We also took a field trip to the local supermarket. Besides getting yummy samples from all the different departments, we got to go in the back to see how the baler worked, we were allowed step into the giant freezer, and then we were able to stand out on the loading dock. Our field trip was even tailored to preschoolers, but we're already planning to return in a few years for their elementary-aged tour. Be sure to check with your local supermarket to see about this fun excursion - it was lots of fun!
Finally, we spent time specifically focusing on apples and Johnny Appleseed.
Our biggest activity for this went along with the William Tell story. You can read all about what we did with our bow and arrow investigation here.
We also made some of our favorite apple recipes, like Insanely Easy Applesauce, Applesauce Energy Smoothie, and Caramel Apple Muffins.
Looking for all the great posts associated with this concept in one place? Check out my Latticed Learning page here!
What's your favorite thing that we did this week? I'd love to hear! Either leave a comment below or email me at lisahealy (at) outlook (dot) com.
Also, if you don't want to miss a single minute of great tips like this and all the fun around here, be sure to sign up for free updates and then look forward to having each post delivered straight to your inbox!
Here were just a few of our favorites:
A Crazy Day at the Critter Cafe is fun to read. The story rhymes well, the illustrations are cool and remind me of this book, and there are all sorts of kooky animals filling the pages.
Sitting Down to Eat has great repetition, animals, a silly ending, and will probably remind you of this story.
Today is Monday and The Very Hungry Caterpillar - two classics that I'm sure everyone is familiar with.
Out to Lunch is a silly book showing what happens when a frog tries to mind his manners at a fancy restaurant.
Froggy Bakes a Cake is not only full of silliness, but you'll find that onomatopoeia graces almost every page, making it fun not only for the listener, but the one reading it aloud, as well!
Gregory the Terrible Eater is a hilarious book about a goat who disappoints his parents by only eating things like fruits and vegetables, instead of their "healthy" diet of trash and old shoes.
Socks for Supper
Growing Vegetable Soup
Pumpkin Pumpkin
Bear and Bunny Grow Tomatoes
Feast for 10
Jamberry
What Am I
Blueberries for Sal
Froggy Eats Out
Apples
The Berenstain Bears Go Out to Eat
Sing Some Songs
Believe it or not, I have at least 70 kiddie songs related to food on my ipod! Here are just a few selections that are good for this theme:
Pretty much any song from the Picnic Playground album, which I raved about here
A bunch of the silly sing-along songs from this album that I shared here
Tons of songs by the guy I wrote about here, particularly from this album
Classics that will jazz up your day from this album, which I shared here
And so many more, but I'll let you search through your own music collection to see what types of food-related songs you can add to a playlist.
Watch Some Videos
There are a ton of fun food cartoons out there, but I think Gv's favorites were this Berenstein Bears episode as well as this one from Super Why.
Play and Create
We did a few things to correspond to our food topic:We planted seeds (saved from the tomatoes and peppers in the previous night's salad) in a little container out in the yard.
We looked through a grocery ad that came in the mail one day, pointing out the different foods we saw and then cutting and gluing them into groups by food type, which turned into Gv creating menus and meals for us for the entire week.
We played with Gv's cool felt food and her other play kitchen toys (ours was a hand-me-down, but it's kind of like this one).
I created a fruit and veggie matching game for Gv. I put all sorts of cute clip art graphics on a page and printed them out in color, then printed another set in black and white. I had her point out the matches between the two sheets, then told her to use the same colors to color in the pictures on the black and white page. Then we cut out each picture, spread them all out, and had her find the matches, naming each one as she did. I used clip art from my favorite Print Shop software to do this, so I can't share it due to copyright reasons, but you can find a similar one that looks really fantastic here.
We also took a field trip to the local supermarket. Besides getting yummy samples from all the different departments, we got to go in the back to see how the baler worked, we were allowed step into the giant freezer, and then we were able to stand out on the loading dock. Our field trip was even tailored to preschoolers, but we're already planning to return in a few years for their elementary-aged tour. Be sure to check with your local supermarket to see about this fun excursion - it was lots of fun!
 |
| Her first free cookie experience from the bakery! |
Our biggest activity for this went along with the William Tell story. You can read all about what we did with our bow and arrow investigation here.
We also made some of our favorite apple recipes, like Insanely Easy Applesauce, Applesauce Energy Smoothie, and Caramel Apple Muffins.
Looking for all the great posts associated with this concept in one place? Check out my Latticed Learning page here!
What's your favorite thing that we did this week? I'd love to hear! Either leave a comment below or email me at lisahealy (at) outlook (dot) com.
Also, if you don't want to miss a single minute of great tips like this and all the fun around here, be sure to sign up for free updates and then look forward to having each post delivered straight to your inbox!
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