Preschool Lesson: Letter "M"

I'm still loving this mommy-preschool rotation with my friend Kailene. Did I mention that I usually have a PowerPoint? I usually have a PowerPoint to go along with our letter. Something very simple. The first slide is always a lower and uppercase letter of the day. We then talk about the sound it makes and make the letter out of popsicle sticks or pipe cleaners. I then have a few slides of pictures of things that start with the letter of the week.

This time, for "M", I let my PowerPoint presentation pictures be my outline for the day. First, I had a picture of the moon.

• Songs: "Zoom, zoom, zoom, we're going to the moon!" and "I'm a Little Rocket!" 
• Book: Goodnight, Moon
• Music video: "I Don't Want to Live on the Moon." I want preschool to be creative and fun, not screen time. Yet I like throwing in a short video clip now and again, especially if it's an old-school Sesame Street song that pulls at my heart strings.

Next, we saw a picture of monkeys.

• Song: 5 Little Monkeys Swinging in a Tree
• Craft: I found cute, chunky monkey stickers at Dollar Tree, so after singing the song, we stopped to color and sticker a quick picture to tell the story. I love how SourPatch is so minimalist in his coloring these days:

Next, we moved onto monsters:

• Large Motor: We did some monster bowling using the cute Melissa and Doug bowling set my sister-in-law gave us.
• Book: We read The Monster at the End of this Book. Anyone else totally in love with this book? It's pretty great. 

• Music Video: I know, I know, we already broke the rules and watched a video! Yet Sesame Street does a great letter M, okay? We watched Monster in the Mirror.
• Craft: I feel like there's lots you could do with monster letter m's: eyes, fangs, fur, scales... we just had googly eyes and pipe cleaner (for limbs?). The kids still liked making them anyways.

• Math: We used these cute Monster Mash Roll and Coloring pages from Little Miss Kindergarten to practice number recognition with dice. We basically just took turns rolling a die (is that how you spell the singular of "dice?" Seems grim.) and coloring in the correct number on the sheets.

For our last picture, a moose, we read the classic If You Give a Moose a Muffin. I feel like a total traitor, but I think I like this book even better than its cookie predecessor. It also reminded us that it was time for a snack. After we ate our muffins and drank our milk, we made m's out of mini marshmallows and toothpicks. 

Another fine motor activity was building and playing with SourPatch's marble run. We made it through one round of the game Memory, too.

Last but not least, we had "Science Time" as we talked about magnetism. The kiddos loved this activity from The Measured Mom where we tested various household objects to see if they are magnetic or not.

Another preschool in the books. Thanks for a fun day, kids!