How to make a Haunted House Letter H

 

 

What could be better for a Halloween letter study than H - for haunted house?!

That's right, this week we're going to start with our letter crafts!  I like to use black and purple paper to make our Haunted Houses, to go along with the Halloween feel.  You'll also need some Halloween cut outs - foam stickers or die cut shapes are easy, and of course scissors and glue.  If you have a flying bat shape to hand from the eaves of your house, you'll also need a needle and thread.

First cut out the uppercase H.  Make two pieces of roof with the narrowest part that is as wide as the uprights on your H.  Cut some crooked rectangles for doors and windows. 

Fold back about a half inch along the sides of each window, and along the top of each roof piece.  Your child will glue only on the folded part, so the windows and doors can hang partly open, and the roof will extend from the house.  Add black cats, ghosts and pumpkins behind each window or door, and if you're hanging a bat from the roof, use a needle and thread to attach it. Ta-da! One haunted house for Halloween!

There are a couple of other ways I like to introduce the Hh sound - one is to put things that start with H in a hat, and have the children name them as I pull them out, emphasizing the Hh sound.  We lay them on a letter H to help make the connection between the sound and the letter.  Items (real or toy) that you might have include horse, hotdog, hats, ham, hammer, hammerhead, hairdryer, hippo and heart.  What else can you and your littles find?

Another fun way to introduce H is to have students ride a hobby horse around a toy house while wearing a hat - lots of letter H things there!  I offer a selection of dress up hats, and let each child take a turn to choose a hat and ride the horse.  As they do, we all sing (to the tune of She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain) "Ride a horse around a house and wear a hat. /H/ /H/"

Don't have a hobby horse?  Make one!  I've seen hobby horses made with a paper bag stuffed with scrunched up newspaper and a paper towel tube "stick" to ride, but my favorite is a variation on our unicorn craft.  You'll need some poster board or other stiff cardboard, and a paint stirrer or ruler, plus yarn for a mane, and whatever craft supplies your child wants to decorate their hobby horse.

Cut out 2 identical horse head shapes (a quick internet search for horse head silhouette brings up lots).  Staple them together.  Hole punch down the back of the neck where the mane will go (this takes a lot of hand strength and is probably a grown up job).  Have your child help you cut 10"-12" lengths of yarn to loop through each hole to create the mane.  Draw one eye on each side of the horse head (children almost always want 2 eyes on each face, so you may have some vaguely creepy horses) and let your child color the horse however they see fit.  Insert the end of the paint stirrer / ruler and you have your very own hobby horse!

For math skills this week, compare how heavy things are.  Have your child gather items to compare, then hold one item in each hand.  Which one do they think is heavier?  If you have a balance scale it's easy to have them check to see if they were right.  This simple comparison is the beginning of learning to measure!

If you'd like to use this as a math center it's available in my TeachersPayTeachers store, but you can also just compare and explore without the task cards - do what works for you and your little ones!

For your hand print crafts this week you could go a couple of different ways.  Stick with our usual representative hand prints and make a hedgehog or a hippo (that's tissue paper "water" added after the paint is dry)...

...or get into Pop Art and make a Warhol style hand print creation from Artolazzi!

Look up Andy Warhol's work on your computer or in a book, and notice the repetitive prints in bold colors.  If you do this project at home try to get all your family members involved - this looks nice with just the 4 hand prints from one person, but put several sets together and it is super impressive!   

- Choose 4-6 colors of paper and stick with them throughout to make a cohesive project.

- Cut your paper into halves or quarters (halves for adults, quarters for children).  Each person needs 4 pieces for the background.

- Make the paper hands in contrasting colors.  Trace a hand on a piece of paper, staple 4 papers together (staples outside of the hand prints so you cut them off), and cut out 4 identical copies of the hand print.  

- Arrange the hand prints on the background papers, making sure to contrast each background and hand.  When satisfied, glue them on.

- Paint your hand black.  Make a print on each hand cut out.

-Arrange the 4 prints in a line or rectangle, and use tape on the back to join them together. 

I didn't invent a cooking project for Hh, and I'm not sure I've done one with my students.  (Insert surprised look here, I think I dropped the ball on this one!)  Not to worry, if you're enjoying cooking for each letter you may enjoy these no-cook horse cookies or these "hippo-tatoes".

 

For more letter h ideas, check out my letter h pinterest board too!  There are crafts for hippos, hedgehogs and hens, a variation on making your own chia pet for silly hair, mixing paint and bubbles to make gorgeous hydrangeas, blowing paint for hair, plus ideas for Hickory Dickory Dock and Humpty Dumpty!

I can't wait to see what you get up to this week!  Remember to tag me on Instagram @PaulaBeckerman2399 and FaceBook Paula's Primary Classroom if you post pictures, and if you're enjoying my ideas follow me too!

Have an awesome week everyone!

Reviewing H - J

This week we are still reviewing letters, while also enjoying spring.  We did two hippo art activities one day, painting plaster hippos, and making paper ones too.  They are both very cute, and worked our fine motor skills.

 

I found the inspiration for the paper hippo here, and modified it to be made with construction paper instead of paper plates.  The children loved it.

There are plenty of good hippo books to read to introduce these crafts.  We really love The Hiccupotomus by Aaron Zenz, and Hiccup by Mercer Mayer.

For the letter I, I considered sampling ice cream again, but decided my friends were already excited enough by our ice cream pretend play.  I've saved a couple of empty ice cream containers, bowls and spoons, and put those out with colorful pompons, what a hit!  I really like that the pompons are easy to pick up once they're done playing, but must admit, they do seem to get spread about a lot!

We also improvised a snow cone shop for the letter i - I'm thinking icy snow.  The cash register was very popular, more than the foam balls, bowls, and empty snowcone syrup bottles we had out for our pretending.  It was interesting to observe the children using the cash register, and to see how they used numbers in their play.  They asked their "customers" for their phone numbers to enter on the register, as well as entering prices, swiping credit and debit cards, and using the scanner on bar codes.

For the letter J we reviewed a fun Spanish language song on youtube.com : Jugo de Naranja.  I made a book from the lyrics a long time ago, and we like to sing the song as we turn the pages.  It's a good review of some basic Spanish vocabulary: me gusta, no me gusta, and lots of food words.

After we sang along with the song, and read the book, I offered each child some orange juice.  "Te gusta jugo de naranja?" I asked each child in turn.  "Si, me gusta jugo de naranja," they answered, and then got some to drink.

We read a book that featured a jellyfish while we drank our jugo de naranja (o.j.) and then made a jelly fish art project, which I found here, and did a jelly fish finger play, which is from here.

This was a particularly busy morning, as we also got to practice our hand writing - on a plate of jelly!  Each child got a plate with a smear of strawberry jelly on it, and practiced forming the letter in the jelly.  Correctly made j's resulted in a tasty lick of their fingers.  Yes, we washed hands before as well as after!  This was literally a sticky proposition, and well loved. 

For any readers who have school aged kiddos, this is also a great way to get them to practice writing their spelling words.  When I taught first grade, I suggested that parents make one evening's spelling practice be writing words in something yummy: jelly, chocolate syrup, peanut butter... I'm sure your children would love to suggest other tasty treats.  No licking fingers until you can write the word or letter correctly - talk about motivating!  Yum!