Though the updates are a little behind, we have been plugging away at our preschool literature plan for the year.  As you’ll plainly see, Caps for Sale was a September book.  Ahem.

But we did complete it (and the books afterwards), and we’re wrapping up Owl Moon for the end of semester one.  The new year will bring big machines, snow and talk of wool & sheep in the early months – my boys will be excited.

Back to Caps for Sale….

Caps for Sale is a little book about a peddler who tries to sell his caps (with no success).  When he decides to rest for a while, a group of monkeys takes them all away!

An exasperated peddler tries to get them all back…read the book to find out exactly just how this gets done!

With this row we did lots of counting – numerals for the preschooler and money for the 1st grader.

In the story, the peddler places caps on his head and attempts to sell them for $0.50 each.  Using Homeschool Creations’ printables, the boys cut and stacked caps in the same order as the peddler…trying to see if they could remember it without the book (with 50/50 results!).

I also found some money counting worksheets, and the first grader and I practiced several ways to make $0.50 and I also introduced simple ways to make change.

I found monkey stickers (Mrs. Grossman’s) and using the free tree printable from Homeschool Share, preschool practice included fine motor skills by placing monkeys up in the tree — he said it was ‘fun’! 🙂

More fine motor practice came with three simple tools:  our blueberry play dough, dry spaghetti and Cheerios.  He worked on ‘stacking caps’ by simply placing the cereal onto the spaghetti.  Lots of great concentration practice too!

We ate bananas (no fun snacks made this time), read about Monkeys and Apes and played several rounds of Monkey See, Monkey Do.

All in all — a great simple row!