Preschool Powol Packets

Super easy and fun, this preschool bat craft provides great fine motor exercise, a little science, a little shape review, and a new vocabulary word! I have a couple kids that love gluing things together to make "projects" like nothing else. I could give them a bottle of glue (or a gluestick), a pile of paper, and scissors and they'd be happy for hours! I decided to capitalize on that for this bat craft to go with the Virtual Book Club's Bat theme this week! Supplies : * "night time" construction paper: blues, purples, or blacks * white paper * cool patterned cupcake liners...I love the options that are available in the fall! * glue sticks and scissors * (optional): brown or black markers * (optional): eye stickers and glitter Preparation : 1- Cut the cupcake liners into bat shapes. This is super easy because you can stack 5-10 liners up and cut through them all at once. I just "eye-balled" the shape, using the cent

My favorite order for teaching letters is to start with the letters in our preschoolers' names. This pumpkins-on-a-gate name activity is perfect for that...and it ties in our favorite fall theme:  5 Little Pumpkins!! We've been working on name recognition and letter recognition a lot this fall, and our kiddos can find their own name easily, but some of them lose track of some of the letters in their name as they try to write them. And, since this week is the Virtual Book Club's Pumpkin theme, I decided to make upper case and lower case pumpkin letters to use with our name activities. (They're also working great for some spelling activities with the older kids!) To make your own Pumpkin Names on a Gate, you just need the free printable (link below), blue construction paper for the background, yellow construction paper for a moon, and scissors and glue! 1- Print and cut out the pumpkin letters. I did this in advance. ;) 2- Make a "pumpkin patch

5 Little Pumpkins is one of our favorite Halloween / Fall rhymes, so we do a lot of 5 Little Pumpkin themed activities and science experiments every October. This STEAM project was a particularly fun science project because it was something all the kids (toddlers, preschoolers, and grade schoolers) could personalize and enjoy together. This project let the kids both express their own creative genius and work together on an engineering project appropriate for preschoolers! Aaaaand, it ties into one of our favorite rhymes, which just happens to be a board book too: 5 Little Pumpkins !! Anyway, you can use this for STEAM learning, a STEM project, or just a fun Halloween activity! It has two basic parts: 1- Designing the Pumpkins, and  2- Designing and building the "gate." To set up the pumpkin design, I simply placed the mini pumpkins, acrylic paints, and paint brushes on the table. We had to add some glitter and wiggly eyes later.  ;)  I also put a 2-foot

This week we're investigating an egg science experiment with inertia for the Farm Theme with the Weekly Virtual Book Club for Kids! This science project works great as either a demonstration or an experiment! It's stunning enough for a group and addicting enough for kids to want to manipulate the variables and test it over and over and over! Let's start with a video! Watch the carefully balanced RAW egg drop safely into the cup of water: Supplies: * Tall cup, filled with water to about 1-2 inches from the brim * raw egg * egg carton top (I've also seen this done with a lightweight pie tin or lid with a flat bottom and short "lip.") * cardboard tube (We used a toilet paper tube.) So what's going on and how can you do it too? There are a lot of principles behind this little project, but my favorite is inertia because it explains so much of what is happening. Inertia is the tendency of an object at rest to stay at re