Preschool Countries: Mexico Theme

Explore the history and adventure of Mexico! We'll be making a tasty Mexican treat, exploring Mexican ruins and reviewing letters, with more emphasis on C & D.

Here are some pictures of what you'll be doing this week. 

Hola! We really enjoyed the Mexico unit which is is week 2 of our 30-week program and is the second week of our first semester "Exploring Our World", where we are learning about 12 different countries.

We start each week with our bins. I print what's in the unit and put any other supplies in the bin the Sunday before. It took about only about 20 minutes to set up these bins for the week. It's always a good idea to read the unit in advance to take note of what supplies are needed for the craft project or the recipe for the week. (The supplies are most often basic).

This is our circle time board. Each day we do the Days of the Week, Hows the Weather, and the Months Chant songs from Super Simple Songs. We put a gold star on each day of the week on a calendar (not shown).

These moveable circles record the daily changes in the day of the week and the weather. 

After circle time every day, we do Wake Up Warm Up, which are daily short math and language arts reviews. Then we get to the other activities, some of which are shown below.

These were our special book selections for the week. As always, we get most books from the library, however we added Migrant to our personal library. 

Our language activities included the letters c and d letter crafts (sorry for the bad photo and it actually shows d and e here). Our school did the Letter c cat and the Letter d drummer. 

We are now up to letter D on our Letter Sounds Train! Lexi placed Carlos and Dolores, students from Mexico into the letter c and d cars respectively and put their letter c and d luggage cards into the cars with them. 

We did a letter C and D cut and paste activity and went ahead and pasted this into Lexi's My First Travel Journal. 

This is the cover of the My First Travel Journal. Throughout our 30 week program we are adding to this.

These are some pages on the map and location of Mexico. We are focusing on recall of the national flag and country location on these pages and also a stuffed plush globe we have in our homeschool classroom. 

The recipe for the week was Queso Blanco and the page picture was placed in the My First Travel Journal on the right side above (the apple pie picture was from the previous USA unit in the notebook).

 

The queso was ridiculously easy to make! We used a small amount of mild green chiles - they were not spicy at all but added a nice flavor. (Mom bonus: We'll definitely be reusing this recipe for dinner party appetizers!) 

Yes, its as good as it looks :)

For the art activity, we did a paper bag piñata. This is an easier version of a piñata that is perfect for preschoolers. 

Our rolling poster cart worked our perfectly for batting the piñata! This is a Lakeshore Learning cart, which by the way has been a helpful tool in our classroom and wasn't too expensive. It really helps when you need extra wall space but don't have it! 

For math in this unit, Lovebug practiced her counting and quantity / symbol recognition and drawing circles with a Mexico 123 activity.

We practiced spacial relationships with this "Chitchen Itza Explorers" 3D activity. We also did some spacial relationship activities during the Wake Up Warm Up activities. 

 Lovebug pointing to objects, beside, behind and in front of, etc.

There were three gross motor activities. This is one of them - a jumping bean activity. Lexi jumped and counted at the same time. This was very easy to setup, was very active for the little one and she was very engaged in this activity. 

There were several other activities not shown.  Enjoy!