Mmmm! Letter of the week M!

For our 4 yr old we decided to do preschool at home and we had so much fun!  Here's what we did when we learned about letter Mm!

Mm: our words were marker, mitten, moon, Mama, mouse, magenta, music, mountain

marker- we did lots of coloring with markers and a little math and sorting, unplanned just happened to be a teachable moment as one day we re-matched caps to the right color marker (little brother likes to take all the caps off and put them on different colors) and we threw out the dry markers and practiced subtraction taking the dried ones away from the working ones.  We counted the markers backwards as we placed them back in the bag.

mitten- we read The Mitten by Jan Brett and did an M is for Mitten craft similar to the one shown at:
http://theprincessandthetot.blogspot.com/2011/08/letter-crafts.html we just used yarn for the connector string between the two mittens and we used a large ink pad and she pressed her handprint into the ink pad then into the outline of each mitten so her hand prints were in the mittens.

Moon- we talked about the phases of the moon and looked at the moon nightly to see which phase it was in.

mouse- we read many of the books in the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie series and then did a cookie math lesson where I cut out a light brown circle and then used a circle puncher to cut out small dark brown circles (chocolate chips) and she practiced writing her letter m on each chocolate chip.  The game was to place her Montessori wooden number cards facedown and then select a card and whatever number was revealed was the number of chocolate chips to use to design the cookie.   But then "oh our tummies are grumbling! we better eat the chocolate chips instead!" So we'd gobble them up (counting backwards from whatever number of chips were on the cookie) and then pick another card to put a different amount of chips on the cookie.  We also read and sang through Three Blind Mice a story that tells how the mice came to find themselves without sight.

magenta- we filled up one row of a muffin tin with water and then did a color experiment of adding drops of different colors to find out which color mixture makes magenta.

music- we read M is for Music, Mole Music, listened to Mozart while playing, doing art, cooking, etc.

monster- this wasn't on a word card, but we read a poem called "Sock Monster" from a book called Kids Pick the Funniest Poems and then I designed a sock monster out of a tin box and she practiced writing her M's on him.  Then we had the sock monster eat her socks!  She had great fun with this game.  This started out as mismatched socks and she needed to match them up first and then the sock monster would get hungry and tear up the pairs and eat them and then "burp!" we'd get them back and she'd have to match them up again.

Matching up her socks

Sock monster gobbling them up!

"I love this game!"

Check out her m's!

Mommy's monster on the top :)

Lego Monster with Dad:

She drew the face on the monster with dry erase marker 

Moses- we read The Moses Basket by Jenny Koralek and also read records about Moses from her kid's bible and watched a Moses animated film made by Hanna Barbera.

mountain- we went for a hike in our CO mountains and then also read and sing through She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain by Jonathan Emmett