PreK Week 8

Mouse Paint

How can one book be used to teach so many different skills and subject areas, especially one as fun as Mouse Paint? From reading and art to social studies, science, math, music and writing, this week we did lots of learning with Mouse Paint.

The activity I want to highlight this week is the art activity for day two and how it fits with the science activity for day four. During the art activity we talked about all the different colors and what things we had at home that were in each color. Then I asked Malachi what his favorite color was (yellow, as it has been from the first day he could grab his own cup, racecar, and ball), and he ran to show me his favorite yellow crayon. When I asked him why we couldn’t see the mice on the white paper, he said that it was invisible, which gave me the perfect opportunity to talk about white on white and yellow on yellow, etc. Then he took his favorite yellow crayon and drew a picture using just that one color. I thought it was funny to see so many things drawn in yellow, and Malachi loved his “yellow world.”

Then on day four for the science activity we talked about how the colors changed in the book, and we used paint and food coloring (separately) to mix all of the colors described in the book. We made purple, orange, green, and more! At first I was surprised that Malachi couldn’t predict what colors would be made by mixing, but then after a few tries, and with his big brother’s help, he was able to predict what colors the mixing would make, and he was so proud.

For more information about the AlphaSkills Read with Sarah curriculum and our family, see the AlphaSkills Blog Introduction.