S is for Snake Preschool Lesson

This lesson is part of a weekly series of home preschool lessons I do for 2 and 3 year olds. Click to see all the other Letter of the Week lessons we’ve done.

We always start our lessons by watching the clip from Leapfrog Letter Factory DVD for the featured letter and then making a letter craft.

These are the books we read throughout the lesson:

“I Don’t Like Snakes” by Nicola Davies: I really liked the format of this book. It’s about a girl who is the only one in her family who does not like snakes and as she tells them all the reasons they explain why/how snakes do what they do. Kids learn a lot about snakes and there is extra trivia you can read as well.

“The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash” by Trinka Hankes Noble and illustrated by Steven Kellogg: A field trip to the farm turns complicated when a boy brings along a boa constrictor. I read many books written and/or illustrated by Steven Kellogg as a kid (including this one) so it makes me feel very nostalgic when I see them.

“Python” by Christopher Cheng describes a python slithering around looking for a meal. We read parts of it in our lesson. It’s a well done book, but it does show details of the python hunting his prey if your kids are easily disturbed by that.

Here are some of the activities we did:

-Cut and paste diamondback snake activity

-Spiral snake activity that we put on a string so that when you’re holding it hangs as a spiral

-The kids favorite thing we did was an egg hunt. After we learned about snakes being born from eggs I hid Easter eggs around the room that had snakes and letter S’s inside. They collected all the eggs and then we took turns opening them to talk about what was inside. Since I only had a few toy snakes I included other egg born animals and modeled it after the egg activity I previously posted about. My snakes came from a various Safari Ltd TOOB sets we own but there are other sets that include more snakes in them.