Fun farm week 4

The kids have really enjoyed the Fun Farm theme. Mooing like cows, quacking like ducks, oinking like pigges, is so much fun. I have a Old Macdonald Cd and we play that on repeat all the time. They enjoy hearing all the animals make noise. 

Another activity Toddlers enjoy is peek a boo. The art activity in the Funshine express curriculum for this week was Peekaboo barn. 

These were so cute and playing peek a boo was even cuter.

The flaps on the side close and open. 

Another game that we have enjoyed playing and singing a song with is Barnyard Bunch.

This is the song we sang.

Sing to "Where, Oh where has my little dog gone?

Where, Oh where does the animal go?

Oh where is one that's the same?

Oh look height and low to see where it goes.

Find one that looks just the same. 

Things are a lot more fun when singing is involved. 

Did you know that Funshine has a faith based curriculum and a school age curriculum? A curriculum for every need. 

If you have not explored the website, I would highly recommend it! You will be surprised how much info and extra's are on it. 

Fall foliage

Happy Friday! Are you ready for the weekend? We have 2 birthday parties on sat and them my daughters is on Sunday. Busy weekend of celebrating.

We finished our week by finishing our fall foliage frames.

This has been my favorite so far. I am sure it will not be the only one.! Funshine has the cutest projects in the kit.

We picked flowers on our nature walk .

outside is such a wonderful way to get hands on with nature. There so much to see and talk about. As we walking, we noticed birds, squirrls, airplanes, leaves blowing, and then the purple flowers. That was the best part. Kiddos love to pick flowers. We smelled them with our noses and talked about how our noses are for smelling. One of my older toddlers said "look it is purple and a circle."

Why yes it is! The world is surrounded by so much learning.

The farm is one of the favorite things to play and I have had it out more because of the fun farm theme.

They love playing with animals with it .

Next week we will continue our fun farm theme with more fun projects and activities. 

Have a super weekend!

Fun farm fun

This week we mooed right into our fun farm theme. Get it?.... Ha! Anyway, this time of year is fun to talk about farms because the pumpkin patch is a popular place to be.

 One of my favorite things I love about Funshine Express curriculum is that I can save many of the games from previous years.

Lydia was singing EIEIO song while matching the farm animal shadow game . This game came in the fireflies curriculm,(3-5 years,)  but could easily be implemented for toddlers. I just put it on the table and waited to see how they would play with it. 

 A few matched the shadows, the younger ones just pointed to the animals and made the sounds. 

It can so versatile.

Since pumpkins are obviously are the thing right now , we enjoyed making paper bag pumpkins.

The toddlers love when they can use paintbrushes and paint. We dipped out brushes in glue and worked quickly to paint the glue in he bag. 

The next step was to rip the tissue paper and glue it on he bag.

I like to make up chants when steps are involved. 

For example,

For the tissue paper 

I would say " rip and stick"

Or for the glueing I would say " dip and rub."

This makes it fun and easy for learning the concept. 

Our beautiful pumpkins.

Mouse crawl

We had a great time finishing our busy mice theme.

 One of the physical  development activities was Mouse Hole crawl.we have talked about how mice look when they crawl.

 I got the blue tunnel out and we practiced crawling through the tunnel.

The kids were squeeking while crawling in and out.

After we crawled for awhile, I gathered the children and told them we are going to a little chant.

We pretended that we were trees and said this  chant.

Tall as a tree

{raise arms high over  head, stand on tiptoes}

Wide as a house 

{stretch arms out wide}

Thin as a pin 

{hold close to body}

Small as a house 

{squat down}

The objective of this chant was to show children how special they are, different sizes , colors. They are all special in their own way. 

Next week we moo into farm fun! 

Hickory dickory mouse

I hope everybody has had a super week. We have been busy with all kinds of things this week.

This is where Funshine  is very helpful. With all the craziness, I know that my lesson is planned for the week.

I just got my box in the mail for the next month and I am excited to dig in to see what things. I may do a video of everything that comes in it. Last year I did a video on Fireflies, but this year I am using the toddler curriculum, Buttercups.

Hickory Dickory Dock was the song we focused on. 

Funshine express curriculum had a cute game that went with the rhyme.

There was a strip that we could slip up and down while saying the rhyme .

Mice live in holes was the topic cars. We talked about how animals live in homes, but that they are different from our homes. 

Mice live in holes in our houses sometimes. A older toddler I have said "oh no, a mice in the hole" 

 Since it is fire prevention Month we played a cute firehouse mouse game

. We played it like a pin the tail on the donkey game.

Toddlers like to do what they like over and over again and we played this game at least 20 times. 

For Art we made these really cute mice. They wanted to use them at hats.

We sang 3 blind mice while using them for finger puppets. 

That is what we have been up to this week. I will post another post tommorow. It has been a really busy week. Glad we have the day off tomorrow. 

Anybody else a Funshine express user? I would love to hear how your experience is. 

Pumpkins etc....

Since we are talking about orange and circles, it is only fitting to talk about pumpkins.

We worked a mouse in the pumpkin patch.

Each one is different and created a different way. Some had lots of pumpkins, others just had 1.

This is  the final product.

Another fun idea that was listed in the Buttercups guide for Physical Development was Mouse and house game.

I cut an arched in a box(kinda like a mouse hole in a wall) . It was large enough for a small ball to roll inside.

We practiced rolling the balls close to the hole and then backed farther away.

The kids had a lot of fun with this.

 One last thing we did was read Mouse's first Halloween.

Mouse kept hearing things, that scares him a little, but then finds out its something not scary. I pointed out the Mouse was using his ears to listen to things and everyone had to be quiet so it is easy to hear.

Funshine express gives plenty of time to get materials and look over curriculum for the next 2 months. Fun shine always sends the kit in the middle of the current month so that you get head start of materials that are needed, laminating, games to be made etc... 

 Glorious , I tell you!! 

Mouse paint and mixing colors.

We This week we are focusing on pumpkins and mixing colors after reading " Mouse paint."  This a book that is on Funshineexpress book list to extend the theme.

 We mixed our own paints to create colors. We look and observed at the colors mixing and changing.

I was out of primary color paint so we mixed fluorescent, but it had the same effect. 

The kiddos loved painting. 

 In the Buttercups curriculum , All about me cards were for the social/ emotional section. 

This week we are learning about our ears and what we use our ears for. 

I pointed out that the firefighter is talking. I asked what the child is doing. One of the older toddlers said " using his ears " 

Since it is fire safety month, we discussed it was very important to listen to firefighters especially in a fire. 

We practiced stopping ,dropping and rolling.

There are so many extensions you can pull from Funshines curriculum. I consider  it peices to a big puzzle!

Busy Bees

We started our new theme busy mice. Funshine has a lot of neat activities with mice. 

This book is one of my favorites. It is simple and I can read it with lots of different emotions and I enjoy that! It's a good problem solving story. 

Day 1 of mouse masks. We colored the face and talked about what a mask is and how we can see through the eye holes.

The masks turned out so cute. None of my friends wanted to have the mask on their eyes, so we made it like a hat.

After we were finished making the mask, we out in animal action and danced and pretending a cat was chasing them and saying "meow"

I introduced the letter M for mouse. We practiced making the "mmmm" sound .

Buttercups has a shape of the month and this month is a circle. We added a orange circle to our water. 

In the curriculum guide there is a song that goes along with shape.

To the tune of "Did you ever see a Lassie"

Oh, something's in the water, the water , the water.

Oh, Something's in the water. Oh, what can it be?

A circle! A circle! We see an orange circle!

A circle's  in the water! A circle that's orange. 

We of course had to have circle pretzels for snack. 

Check more pictures out on Instagram @ coleykidscreations 

Also follow @funshineexpress for more cute ideas.