Feeling Fabulous About Ff!

Are you feeling fabulous about Ff - and all the other letters so far?  Preschool learning (and teaching!) is so much fun!  Let's jump in and get started!

Make Friendship Fruit Salad

This is the easiest cooking activity EVER!  Each year for the letter Ff I would ask each family to send in 1 piece of fruit.  No need to assign apples here and bananas there - it truly doesn't matter which fruits you have, or what quantities!  This is friendship fruit salad after all - we get to share the making and the eating with our friends.

Since fruit salad also doesn't need any actual cooking, the children can do all the steps!  The first part of cooking is ALWAYS washing our hands.  The children also washed their fruit, and then used butter knives to cut it up into small pieces. (I do core the apples and pears, and quarter them).  Most fruit is soft enough that it is easy to cut with a butter knife, and this is a good time to teach children how to hold the fruit with one hand, and hold the knife with the other.  Have a look at these little hands - they all have their index fingers pointed along the knife to help apply pressure, and their fingers safely back from the knife.  This is a great early introduction to cutting, and lays the foundation for bigger cooking projects down the road.

Did I mention the eating part?  Fruit salad is a healthy snack, and if you and your friends made it together, you know they all want to try it!  There's seldom any left over either - this tasty treat gets gobbled right up!

Finding things that start with Ff in our feely box

I'm going to start with the classroom version of a feely box, but I also have a super easy at home version.  If you're going to be teaching the letter Ff to a big group of children year after year you might prefer something more sturdy and more educational than if you're teaching your own child only.

My feely box for Ff was a shoe box in a previous life... until I covered it with flower photos, and lined it with fake fur, and filled it with fences, fires, flies, frogs and everything else I could find that starts with Ff.

Here we are taking turns reaching in and finding things that start with Ff to put next to our letter F, all the while making the f sound.

The at home super easy version of the feely box is just that - super easy!

Field trips

I've said it innumerable times, but I'll keep on saying it: children learn best through hands on experiences.  If you can get out and explore the world, do.  Talk about everything you're seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, hearing and thinking!  Your child will learn the big words and big ideas you share with them, and you'll both have fun.  

For the letter F some of my favorite suggestions are to go to a farm, see flamingos at the zoo, look for fish and frogs (at an aquarium or zoo, or at the pond), find a fountain and flowers at the botanical gardens.  No botanical garden near you?  Find a flower shop or just a pretty park! What other field trip ideas can you think of? 

Fun on the farm from home

Even if you can't get to a real farm, you can bring out farm themed learning!  Do you have a toy farm, or toy farm animals?  Let your child sort them, or order them in height.  Count how many horses - and find out if there are more sheep or cows.  

I'm a huge fan of tangram puzzles, and have an adorable farm set that makes practicing shapes fun.

Make the letter F for your home-made alphabet.

Want to know a secret?  It's not SO secret... but I had no idea what I was doing on a lot of my letter crafts when I first decided to do it.  I'd seen a few ideas for some letters, and decided to go for the whole alphabet, but....  what to do?  That's why the lower case letter f looks like I got into my craft supplies and found everything I could that starts with f: flowers, flamingos and feathers.  The bits and bobs  you have on hand, left over from long ago craft projects are GOLD to your child.  Please don't feel like you have to reproduce someone else's ideas exactly, just do what works for you and your child.  :-)  

My upper case letter F started with a die cut frog years ago, and that was it - until I saw some plastic flies one Halloween, and bought up a teacher life time supply of them.  The frog tongue has been a strip of paper, or a piece of ribbon - either way, our froggy is catching a fly, and it works.  For more frog learning activities, hop over to my TeachersPayTeachers store here.
 

Sing songs

Have you caught on that this is an every week activity?  There are always songs to sing, you can do it anywhere, it's free, and it makes you feel good.  Let's sing!

That's enough to keep you and your little one super busy for about a month - but I have more letter Ff ideas, so come back on Wednesday for hand prints, a sensory bin, and some very silly fish hats!  Until then, enjoy, and remember to tag me if you post about doing any of these activities on social media! 

@paulabeckerman2399 on Instagram and Paula's Primary Classroom on FaceBook.

Friendship Fruit Salad

We like to cook!  Okay, this wasn't really cooking, but the children were very involved in making our Friendship Fruit Salad.  

You can tell just by looking at the delicious ingredients, this is good food!

 

I asked each family to provide one piece of fruit for the salad, and we had a lovely variety show up.  Last year I had a helper on fruit salad day, and was able to have the children wash, peel, cut and totally prepare their piece of fruit.  This year I did a lot of the prep work during nap (except peeling and cutting bananas, those are best done immediately before serving), as I was on my own on this day.  It all worked out beautifully!

 The children added their ingredient to the bowl, and our salad slowly came together.

 One child even brought a lime he had picked from his grandmother's tree, and squeezed the juice over the rest of the fruit!

 The result?  Lots of thumbs up from the children, a huge amount of fruit eaten (can we have fifth servings Ms. Paula? -  yes!), vitamins taken in, fine motor skills practiced, and a community building exercise for a group of 3-5 year olds. 

That gets my thumbs up too!

Fun with letter Ff

One of the very important subject to cover for the letter Ff is fire safety.  

Each month, when we do our fire drill, we start by going over the 3 things necessary for a fire: fuel, a spark, and oxygen.  I light a candle in a jar, and then put on the lid, and we count how many seconds it takes for the fire to go out.  The kiddos know that without oxygen in the air, a fire will be smothered and go out.  

Next we practice our stop, drop, and roll drill.  If our clothes ever catch on fire, we would definitely want the fire to go out, so we smother it by pushing it into the ground where it can't get any oxygen.  An adult might help smother the fire with a blanket or pillow, but they might get burned helping out, so kids don't do that.  See how we cover our eyes to protect them?

 We check out our fire extinguisher, to make sure it is charged and ready, just in case we ever need it.

 We practice lining up quickly, ready to exit, and one of the teachers takes the sign in sheet with us, so we can check that everyone is out safely.  This is a time to be quiet, so we can hear any instructions our teachers give us!

 We walk quickly to the mail box - that's our meeting place in an emergency.  Here the kiddos are telling me where they see people.  If there was a real fire, we would need to find someone to call 911 for help.

Another day, I took some of the kiddos on a field trip to the Botanic Gardens.  We saw so many awesome things!  Flowers...

 foot prints...

 we even stopped in a comfy place to draw and write about what we were seeing.

 There is a beautiful fountain in a pond, so we stopped a while to watch the turtles in the water.

 Back at home we heard the story of Rainbow Fish, and even saw a short video of the book, then we painted our own plaster rainbow fish.

 Cleaning the table is as much fun as the painting is when we use shaving cream!

We added silver glitter as a finishing touch.

Here are some of our finished fish.

 

On Thursday, we made Friendship Fruit Salad for snack.  Each child brought a piece of fruit from home to contribute, and we graphed the different kinds of fruit that came in.  We also graphed which day each child brought their fruit.

We all helped to make the fruit salad. The kiddos rinsed...

cut...

(look how we make our fingers into a tent over the knife, to keep them away from the cutting edge.  You have to watch those butter knives, you know!)

...and finally tossed (literally!) the fruit in the bowl. So was it any good?

 Well, we had a first serving... then seconds, thirds, fourths and even fifth servings!  The kiddos LOVED the friendship fruit salad!  Yummy yummy!