Saturday, May 30, 2015

Jax 5/30


Greetings from Jax! Our family is brand new here to the Jacksonville area. I am a huge supporter of being active in your community and in that spirit I am going to start a blog series on exciting and fun things to do around our new home! If you are in our area I would love new ideas on what to do - you can email me at bloggingwithwitz@gmail.com

One of our weekly activities here in Jax has been a weekly trip to the library. We love the preschool story time the public library near our house puts on every week. It's a great way to get Gracie socialized with other kids while we are still new to the area. The ladies who work at the library are phenomenal as well! They always have good stories and truly keep the kids engaged. Have you looked up library reading times at your local library? 

We made our own brides!



This morning we read one of our favorites - Fancy Nancy! I love the "fancy" vocabulary words and love that Gracie has incorporated words like Zany and Brilliant into her everyday language! This installment is titled Fancy Nancy and the Wedding of the Century! For our project we designed our own fancy wedding gowns with some materials around the house. Some materials we used were toilet paper, cut up plastic bag, straws and cotton balls. Gracie felt all the materials and we discussed differences in textures. She decided a wedding dress should be smooth, soft and fluffy and off she was to create something glamorous. The finished product was pretty fancy if I do say so myself!

Thursday, May 28, 2015

The Letter "M"

I'm not sure if preschool adventures is exactly accurate but for now it works. I may change the name of this blog series in the future but who knows - life here in Jax is BUSY. I thought all my days would be spent at the beach and frolicking in the surf and sand. Boy was I WRONG!
My favorite activity we did during our homeschool time this week involved the letter M! We read our favorite letter book featuring M. Gracie traced her letters and practiced writing M. We talked about all the things we could think of that started with the mmmm sound. For our craft we went through the local grocery ads (we get too many of these weekly if you ask me!) and she cut out anything that started with the letter M. Gracie needed a little help with the products but she did a great job cutting and pasting to the page!

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Greetings from Jax


Greetings from Jax! Our family is brand new here to the Jacksonville area. I am a huge supporter of being active in your community and in that spirit I am going to start a blog series on exciting and fun things to do around our new home! If you are in our area I would love new ideas on what to do - you can email me at bloggingwithwitz@gmail.com

This past weekend our family traveled about 45mins away from our home down to beautiful St.Augustine FL for the 2nd Annual Gathering of Friends: Children's Arts Festival
This festival was 100% FREE! Everyone knows how much I love free stuff! The whole amphitheater was transformed into a kid friendly atmosphere. Lots of balloons and color and even pirates! Gracie got to explore many different booths and got to try her hand at many different art styles. My favorite by far was the booth that let the kids paint using leaves, sticks and other things found in nature as their paint brush. Gracie loved meeting Clifford the Big Red Dog and decorating her own drinking cup. Not too much for Claire to do except lounge in the sunshine, but since that is her favorite thing to do she was a happy girl!
I heard about the Kids Art Festival just by googling fun things to do in the Jacksonville area. I suggest going out and trying as many things as you can in your own community!
You never know how much fun you can have until you try!

Monday, May 18, 2015

Preschool Adventures 5/19






I am not by any means a trained preschool teacher. I am just a Mom trying to teach my 4year old skills that will help her succeed in preschool and having some fun along the way! follow me as I try to navigate through a world of numbers, letters, songs and crafts! This week my favorite preschool day was all about pirates! We practiced tracing and writing the letter P, practiced our P sounds and discussed what we thought Pirates liked to do out on the seven seas!

 


We read Do Pirates Take Baths? by Kathy Tucker
 


What a funny read! Gracie was giggling the whole time. I had made a treasure map of our neighborhood and after our story Gracie grabbed her pirate hat and we embarked on our little journey! The map had a few special markers like our street sign and the park near our house. Gracie's "treasure" was a Hershey's Chocolate kiss that was buried in the sandbox. Unfortunately it was a little melted in the 90 degree heat but Gracie had no complaints! After our adventure Gracie wanted to create her own treasure map and spent the afternoon exploring our house with her dolls. 

Check back next week for more adventures in preschool!