One Year Old Preschool: Green

This is week five of a seven week unit on the colors of the rainbow, culminating in a “review week” where we talk about rainbows.

The purpose of this unit is to teach the colors, encourage recognition and differentiation of color, and to explain the reason we have rainbows.

Our Bible verse for the unit is Genesis 9:13, 15: “I set my [rain]bow in the cloud…I will remember.”  We will be doing a lot of Noah’s ark discussion during this unit. We will also be working on a craft project throughout the unit that ties into the NAoah’s ark theme.

This week our focus color is green and it was a minimal week on activities, but G already has a very good grasp on the color.  Nonetheless, review is how we learn, so here is what we did!

Reading:

Besides pointing out and focusing on green when reading our books this week, we also read a favorite of ours: Where is the Green Sheep?  I have lots of ideas for how to make this book come alive and I will be doing them in coming weeks, but this week we read the book in English and Spanish.  She very much enjoys it and can imitate the rhythm of the prose and recognize many of the sheep.

Activities: 

We worked with the bead stacker I created in our blue unit and just switched out the color of the beads.  This does not hold her attention as long as I might have thought, but she does enjoy it for a good 5-10 minute period before moving on.  I ask her to, “Put the green beads on the red rod,” and “count the beads.”  She is definitely able to do both of these things, but we are still working on the number 5.  When she counts, she says, “One, two, three, four, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, thirteen, thirteen, thirteen.”  In G’s economy thirteen is infinity.

I also set up a transferring activity for G to do this week.  I used some heart-shaped green ice-cube trays (from the dollar spot at Target) and some glitter pom-pom (from the dollar store).  The amount of pom-pom was not equal to the amount of ice-cube molds, so she spent a LONG time trying to fill it up.  She would just get the pom-pom all transferred to new molds and discover, she still had empty molds!  It was fun to see the gears turning in her head.  I guess I created quite a conundrum for her.

For our sensory bin this week, I kept it pretty simple.  From previous weeks, I had discovered G’s favorite part of the bins is the rice.  She would play with the other things and examine them for some of the time we had the bins out, but she would spend the majority of the time scooping, pouring, transferring, and digging in the rice.  So this week, I only included blocks, beads, pom-pom, a cup and some bowls.  She spent the same amount of time she would have spent in previous weeks, but it was definitely focused on her favorite activities.

She is getting neater with the rice, keeping it in the bin for the most part, but there is always a little that escapes.  G is very much her mother’s daughter in that she loves to be clean and help clean. Lately she has been quite taken with sweeping, so I thought I would introduce some basic sweeping techniques to her.  I took some green tape and outlined one of the small square tiles on our floor.

Then I showed her how to “sweep” with an apple-shaped brush (of sorts).  Then I gave it to her to try.  Let’s just say the results were less than clean.  But she discovered a more interesting use for the brush.  We must be a little early on her motor skill ability for this one.

Arts & Crafts

We worked on a basic craft of a turtle this week to reinforce shapes and the color green.  We love the way it turned out and it was so simple to complete.

We are almost done with our color unit and we have had so much fun with all the activities and books.  Next week is purple and boy is it going to be fun!