Underwear, ugly upside down cake, and unicorns

We love unicorns for the letter U.  We started this week by reading The Midnight Unicorn, by Neil Reed.  To follow up, we made stick horse unicorns, and each child decorated theirs just the way they wanted it.  We had a unicorn sensory play tub, with pompons (white, sparkly, and colors to sort), a rainbow, and some ponies and unicorns.

 We rode our beautiful unicorns around the room all morning!

 Chinese New Year started last Friday, and we made some cute fire breathing dragons that I found on http://babyccinokids.com.  They weren't dry enough to play with when the kiddos left on Friday, so we enjoyed those this week too.  We did do other things for Chinese New Year, I just didn't take photos: we ate fried rice and stir fried veggies, read some books, and even got red envelopes with money in them.  Gung Hay Fat Chow!  Happy New Year!

 Our pompons needed to be pinned while they were drying, so they wouldn't roll off.  Pinching clothes pins to hold them was a good fine motor work out!

We read a couple of underwear themed stories, Underwear by Mary Elise Monsell, and Arthur's Underwear, by Marc Brown, then made a letter u craft that was covered in fancy underwear.  We also made a class book about Pete the Cat's underwear - but that's the next post.

We all did a foot print painting this week - can you tell it tickles and feels good?  We made unicorns.

 The teachers painted everyone's feet, then the kiddos added manes and horns with paint.

 Once they were dry, they added eyes and colors in the mane, and everyone made a pretty rainbow background for their unicorns.  We know the order of the colors in a rainbow!

 I had to include this one... we had a couple of unicorns with pompadours!

Another day we made a USA flag snack.  I saw several variations on this idea on the internet, and put it all together to suit this group of kiddos.  We used graham crackers, cream cheese, and pieces of fruit roll up to make our flags, and they were YUMMY!

We had to do something with umbrellas for the letter U, so the kiddos covered their U craft with umbrellas, and dripped white paint onto them immediately before hanging them up.  The paint ran down the umbrellas like rain.  I got this great idea from  mama-jenn.  She used glue, but when I tried this project with glue, it dried too clear!  The paint may be too white... maybe next time I'll combine the two!

One of the kiddos brought in another funny underwear book, and we put baby doll underwear on our dinosaurs.  Crazy!

I try to do a cooking activity with the kiddos every week, and this was no exception.  This week we made ugly upside down cake.  We washed hands, and got out all the ingredients...

 Our peaches were in slices, so many of the children had turns cutting the fruit into smaller pieces.  This is when I thought it would really get ugly!  We had several friends try to lick their knives - that wouldn't have been pretty - some knife dropping, step stool flipping... but in the end, everything was put together.

 We cut butter into tiny pieces...

 ...dumped yellow cake mix and cinnamon on top of the peaches...

 ...sprinkled the pieces of butter on top, and baked it for 45 minutes at 375*.

Was it tasty?  Did we like it?  Oh yes!