Preschool Powol Packets

June is National Safety Month , so today I am sharing a fun, free board game for kids (that reviews important safety habits) and some great courses from ChildCare Education Institute about safety outdoors and during transportation! Free Printable Game To The Playground! is a board game that you can print and glue onto a file folder! It's the perfect size to put on one side of the folder with the rules on the other side. I recommend stapling a ziplock baggie to the folder so that you can keep the cards attached to the game! You will also want to grab a die and pop that in the baggie too! You can download or print the game for free at the bottom of this post! The printable file comes with the following: 1- board game 1- rules page 12- True/False Cards All you need to do is cut out the cards and grab a die and play pieces for each player! Here are the rules: SET UP:   1- Print the game board. 2- Print & cut out the cards. 3- Get a "marker" for each player (coins, colo...

Almost everything we know about dinosaurs comes from rocks, so the first day of our little preschool dinosaur summer camp is also all about rocks and fossils!  Preschool Dinosaur Summer Camp (or Unit Study) Day 1 You can see the 4-day outline for our DIY preK summer camp here !   The first activity is a rock hunt! Rocks can tell us incredible stories about where they have been! Smooth, shiny rocks have usually spent some time in a river where their rough edges were worn away. Some rocks have crystals or other minerals inside them that you cannot see on the outside. A Dinosaur Made Me Sneeze is a great introduction to how rocks can change with time. It also ties into the dinosaur theme brilliantly! (Of course, I'm the author of this one, so I am a tiny bit biased!) (hint: You can buy it on Amazon or use the code Dinosaur25 at OakieBees.com !!) After you read the book, go on a rock hunt and see if you can find any cool-looking rocks!  Do any of them match the pictur...

We started a set of egg shell gardens last week...you know how fun it is to try something new with an "old" item? This. is. awesome! It all started about a week ago when Cerys from Rainy Day Mum shared a picture of her cress-egg-shell-heads on the Virtual Book Club Facebook page .  My first reaction was, wouldn't this be awesome with vegetables?!! So I saved eggs for a couple days. With 5 kids, it didn't take long to get two dozen shells! We rinsed out the eggs, drew faces on them, and put them in the cardboard egg cartons to set up our egg shell garden. Aren't they adorable?! Drawing faces on the egg shells was a great activity for my preschoolers, but my older kids had just as much fun designing theirs! I chose the cardboard egg cartons because you can bury the cartons right in the ground with your eggs!  Sidenote : It is only April 16th, and in Virginia we have a chance of frost until May. I'm going to wait a ...

Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, United States, is the longest cave system in the world (that we know of!) and has fantastic tour opportunities for kids and adults of all ages! We recently met up with another  family and spent two days at the caves and on the Mammoth Cave National Park property. I won't lie...I love caves! I have a geology degree because I think rocks are one of the coolest things on the planet, so visiting these caves with my kids and our friends was perfect! The entire adventure started with choosing a tour. There are more than a dozen to choose from! You can (and should!) make reservations online in advance, especially if you are going during summer or Spring Break seasons. We went in March, so we thought we could just show up and grab tickets, which made things a little more complicated. If you wait until the day of your visit, you have to buy tickets in person at the Visitor Center. But, they sell out FAST! We showed up at about 10:30 in the morning, and ...

The biggest frog I ever saw was one my brother caught when we were kids. About a mile from our house was a pond, and this frog was at least 18 inches long! For real!! You can have an awesome frog unit even if you don't have a giant bullfrog! This frog themed activity requires virtually no set up, can be done indoors or outdoors, exercises gross motor skills/coordination, and helps reinforce and teach concepts of forward/backward, high/low notes, and counting to two. Plus, it uses handbells, which are one of our most popular educational tools! This handbell froghop is especially great when you need an activity to help your preschoolers' center their attention and focus on you. All you need to do is pull out two handbells--one high note and one low note. I like to use two c-bells one octave apart. Explain to your preschoolers that they all start out in a line (about 15 feet away from you). When you ring the high note they all take two frog hops toward you. Wh...

Welcome to my "bookshelf" for {FREE} Insects, Bugs, & Spiders Themed Preschool Printables!! It's hard to come up with one word to describe all the small critters on this page, but I think "macroinvertebrates" might be the closest thing...basically, all insects, spiders, worms, and crawling critters (without a spine)! This includes ladybugs and butterflies printables too! Since there will be a lot of free printables in this category, I'm dividing it up into the following sections: General Bug Free Preschool Printables Spider Themed Free Preschool Printables Ladybug Themed Free Preschool Printables Bee & Butterfly Themed Free Preschool Printables Worm & Other Macroinvertebrates Themed Free Preschool Printables Feel free to scroll down to whichever category you are most interested! And "bee" sure to pin this page and come back to it -- I will keep adding insect and bug printables here. They are a favorite t...