Fun with Elephant and Piggie!

We LOVE Elephant and Piggie!  And Pigeon! And Knuffle Bunny!  Pretty much all of Mo Willems' books!  Okay... I guess basically I just love books... but Elephant and Piggie are special!

This week we had an Elephant and Piggie story time.  :-)  Do you see who is trying to sneak in?

That silly Pigeon!  Don't worry Pigeon, you'll have your own special day in a few weeks.

Ms. Debbie and I acted out/read There Is A Bird On My Head.  I knew we were having fun with it, but it wasn't until I looked at the pictures one of our patrons took of us reading, that I saw how focused the children were on us.  I think the kiddos may have enjoyed it almost as much as we did!

Of course we sang and danced, and Ms. Debbie read another book about our cute friends - and then we got to play/learn.

I downloaded the Pigeon and Duckling finger puppets from PigeonPresents.com.  Mo Willems has all kinds of awesome resources for schools and libraries to use for his book celebrations, and there are also online games for children to play on his site.  You should definitely check it out!

The children made "nests" from paper bowls and brown paper.  I especially love the skinny pieces of cut brown paper sack, they made awesome "straw" for the nests.  Everyone colored birds and put them in their nests.  Now they can act out the story just like Ms. Debbie and I did!

Look at those fine motor skills - strengthening little fingers to prepare them for writing tasks as they prepare for school.

 

Our next station was making Piggie paper bag puppets.  I found the idea here.  There wasn't a pattern for them, and our paper sacks were very small, so I whipped up an outline and made copies on pink paper.  

The kiddos cut them out, and added eyes and nostrils to their piggy faces, and ta-da!  Piggie puppets!

Of course we also needed a third activity, a sensory bin.  One of the Elephant and Piggie books is Shall I Share My Ice Cream?, so Ms. Kathleen made us some ice cream dough.  She mixed a large box of baking soda with several packets of frosting mix in (just color and scent, sugar free powdered drink mix would work too), and made us pink and blue "ice cream" to play with.  We kept it in the refrigerator until it was time to play, so that it was cold too!

We pulled out ice cream scoops and some stale ice cream cones, and our friends had a great time!

I often mention that the children have different ideas for how to use things than what we envision, and this week was no exception.  One little girl played with her "ice cream" for so long that the cone began falling apart.  That was a new opportunity to explore, and she crumbled the cone and dough together for a very long time.  As I watched her, she told me she was making it into a "salad".  (I can see a lot of potential for an ice cream salad, she's brilliant!)

I turned poster board into the cover of an Elephant and Piggy book, I Am In A Book, and we took pictures of our friends in it.  When they were all done, Ms. Debbie and I had a turn too!

As the children left, we asked them to vote/graph about which character they preferred, Elephant or Piggie.

The graph is on the bottom left of our new graphing wall, and you can see for yourself which character had the most votes!  I created some posters to help parents see what we learn from this activity, and am happy to share them with you too.  They are free on my TeachersPayTeachers store, please click and download.

We'll keep building on this wall each week, always talking briefly about the results of the previous week's graph.  When we looked at our Chinese New Year graph, we noticed that there were 10 votes for dragon painting, and 10 votes for tangrams - they were equal!  We learned the sign language sign for equal, and added a great math word to our vocabularies.  I made sure that this week's graph is oriented vertically, because graphs are definitely not always horizontal.  We'll have to have some pictographs soon, and.... well, all that will have to wait.  Stay tuned, and come back next week to see what else we are getting up to at the library!

Need more Elephant and Piggie ideas?  Check out my post about Happy Pig Day  with lots more ideas about celebrating these favorite characters!

Ice Cream!

I'm not sure what got me thinking about ice cream today - really, does there need to be a reason?  Almost everyone likes ice cream, and when we like things, we're more inclined to learn about them.  Today I'm going to share some of the ways I've harnessed a love of ice cream to get kiddos learning.

Disclaimer: Looking at pictures of ice cream may cause you to crave and or eat it.  I cannot be held responsible for my own ice cream eating, let alone yours! 

Every  summer we make ice cream with the children.  We read a recipe, gather ingredients, follow directions, and measure ingredients. (Keep reading for my favorite recipe!)

 By the time the ice cream maker is done, the children are well and truly ready to taste it!  In the meantime, we graph which flavor we think we like the best, or if we think we will like a particular flavor.

This is a great time to compare numbers: greater than, less than or equal.  Real life learning!

 Sometimes we eat it in cones, sometimes in a bowl.  We usually read one of our favorite ice cream books at story time or while we're eating too.

 Some years we've made a book about our ice cream experiences.  I've made a simple class book about it, which is available at  TeachersPayTeachers if you are interested.  

Another fun way to extend the learning for young children is to have them cook up a batch of dough and pretend.  I grabbed bowls, cups, spoons, etc. from my toy kitchen, added dough and kiddos, and we made all kinds of delicious concoctions.  As they played and pretended, the children cooperated, worked their finger muscles (important for writing skills), spoke and listened to each other about what they were doing, and more.  Child's play is how kiddos learn, and as you can see, they were all very engaged with what they were doing.

 When we work on our letter Ii, ice cream is a sure way to help them connect the long i sound with a concrete object. I especially like pictures of ice cream with a cherry on top - I tell the children it's like the dot on top of the letter i, which helps them remember too.

Another fun way to get "hands on" is with ice cream puffy paint.  I found the idea on pinterest, from http://www.gettingmessywithmsjessi.com/search/label/ice%20cream.  It's just a mixture of shaving cream, white glue, and tempera paint.  The kiddos mix it up, then paint the ice cream on top of their cone.  When it dries, it is still textured, and feels beautifully soft and silky.  (We painted it with our hands too, for more sensory fun!)

Some years I like to do a taste test with the children, giving them several flavors to try.  Of course, we graph which we think we will like best, and then which one they actually prefer.  The children are often surprised to discover a new favorite!

There are so many ways to engage our students in learning, and I have to admit, I'm not above using ice cream or other food to reach them.  Here's another ice cream themed game I've made, for students who are ready to learn to tell time.

There are lots more brilliant ideas about engaging students with food, I've gathered some of them on my Food and Nutrition Pinterest board - I hope you'll check it out!

As promised, here's my favorite recipe!  It was hand written on the back of an envelope by one of my daycare mommies years ago, so I can't tell you who wrote it, but I can absolutely tell you we love it!

In your ice cream machine, put 2 or 3 cans of sweetened condensed milk, 1 or 2 cans of evaporated milk, 1 teaspoon of vanilla flavoring, fruit or chocolate chips as you prefer, and then top off to the fill line with milk.  Churn until done, then EAT!

I'd love to hear how you engage your students too.  In the meantime, I'm off to find some ice cream!

I like learning i

I'll start by admitting that the phrase "I like learning i" comes from one of the songs we've been listening to this week on youtube.com.  It's a Storybots song, and it is sooooo catchy - in fact, I woke up in the middle of the night with it going through my head a couple of nights ago! 

The children LOVE using our youtube.com playlists each morning, and learn so much by singing and dancing about learning concepts.  In addition to Storybots, I like to use a lot of HarryKindergarten and The Learning Station music videos.  Here's a link to this weeks' playlist.  By far the favorite song this week was Jack Hartman's Silly Pirate Song , especially the phrase, "Hey Dude, surf's up!" 

There aren't as many fun ways to learn about the letter Ii as there are for some letters, but we found some ways to learn and play all at once.  I've created an "ice cream" sensory play bin for the children, and it had lots of use this week.  In a shallow tub I put all the pompons I could find, several clean and empty ice cream boxes with their lids, some toy food ice creams and cones, empty containers from sprinkles, spoons and bowls.  The children scooped, poured, sorted, pretended, and worked on social skills like sharing and turn taking.  Stuffing small pompons in the tiny jars (from sprinkles) was the hit of the week - and worked on fine motor development, strengthening finger muscles in preparation for writing.  The children will tell you it was a fun way to play.

Our upper case I craft was decorated as an ice cream.  The children cut out their letters (more finger strengthening work as well as hand-eye coordination), then glued on cones, "ice cream" and sprinkles. 

 They looked delicious hanging on the wall, along with our "inchworm" lower case i crafts.

You won't be surprised to know that our ice cream taste test was also a happy and fun event for the children.  I bought 3 flavors of ice cream; chocolate, strawberry, and mint chocolate chip.  We were scientists, and predicted which flavor we would like the best, and graphed it (math and reading our names).

 The best part was definitely the tasting!  (I'm not talking about what the children liked now, I'm talking about Ms. Paula and Ms. Julie!  Yum!)  It was interesting to revisit the graph after we tasted, because several children discovered a new favorite flavor!

We also enjoyed playing instruments for the letter i.  I have an outside carpet that we put down, and the children play the instruments on the carpet, or have a marching band on the driveway.  Some of the boys got very excited about drumming this week, and spent hours of our outside play time using plastic bowling pins to drum on the tree trunks, the playground, and some empty crates.  They made a very satisfying sound, and the boys involved got some big body play out of the experience.

Our final letter i activity was to make an Itsy Bitsy Spider craft, to read an Isty Bitsy Spider book by Iza Trapani, and of course to do the finger play.  Have you met "The Great Big Hairy Spider?"  It's just like the itsy bitsy spider, but of course much louder, and with much bigger hand motions.  It's a hoot to see the kiddos act it out, and use their big, deep voices to say it!

The children decorate their "house" cut out, and we add a spider ring to a drinking straw "water spout".  (I think this idea originally came from Mailbox magazine.)

See, just like the Storybots sing, "I is incredible, I like learning Ii!"

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!