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.

Get Hopping with Frogs!

It is definitely spring - at least it is here in Northern California!  What could signal spring more than watching the landscape awaken from it's winter slumber?  The trees are greening, flowers blooming, and small things are skittering about in the garden again - so this week, we learned about frogs and their life cycles.

We enjoyed frog books - both fiction and non-fiction - and talked about a great big word: metamorphosis.  We sang and danced, and jumped like frogs too.  Then, of course, we had frog learning / play!  Here's a pond sensory bin, because regular readers (and people who know small children) know that our youngsters crave this kind of sensory input.  We had fish, frogs and ducks in the pond, and some insects sitting on the sides - frogs have to eat you know!  Do you see the little pieces of bubble wrap?  The clusters of bubble wrap represent frog eggs, and the long strands represent toad eggs.  Our friends enjoyed burying all the pond elements, perching frogs on lily pads, and carefully filling the fish and frog finger puppets with little blue pellets.

Since we were learning some real facts about frogs, including their life cycle, I made up a set of 3 part cards about the stages in frog development: eggs, tadpole, tadpole with legs, froglet, and frog.  The card with both word and picture is a control card, and the kiddos and parents looked at the words to figure out what each one said.  Then the students found the matching word card and matching picture card for each one.  We had lots of visual discrimination, looking at the length of words and which letters were in them, some sounding out, and a few frog noises too.  :-)  My favorite part was seeing the grins on the children's faces when they made a match, and realized that they can read!

The highlight of the week however was most definitely the guest frogs that came to spend the day with us!

 These African water frogs don't need rocks to sit on or anything, they're happy to swim about in a shallow container of water.  Our friends loved observing them with magnifying glasses, then drawing and writing about what they observed.  One of my friends noticed that the frogs had 4 toes on their front feet, and 5 on their back feet. 

 Other friends drew detailed pictures, right down to imaginary eggs.  (One little girl had a mommy frog and a daddy frog, plus a line of eggs.  I said maybe they were toads, since their eggs were in a long string.  She said no, they were special frogs.  Truly, they were!)

Do you think our friends were fascinated with the frogs?  That they wanted some seriously up close and personal time with them?  I'm just grateful no-one tested the (much discussed) theory of whether any of our frogs were princes in disguise, and in need of kissing!

As they left, the kiddos filled in a graph, telling whether they would like the chance to hold a frog or not.  The answer was a resounding 18 yes votes to 3 no votes.  I guess frogs are a hit!

Good news kiddos, we're not done with frogs yet!  In a few weeks, when there are tadpoles out, we're going to bring some in to visit again.  There is so much more to observe and learn!

Fabulous fun for the letter F

 I mentioned recently that I like to have a "big event" to start each week, something that is hands on and memorable for the children, and will help them remember our letter of the week.  For the letter F I've made a flowery feely box lined with fur, and the children take turns feeling in it for an item that starts with F.  There's plenty of good stuff to find!

 As they find and identify each item, we put it on a paper letter F, and then we make it available for playing with.

 The children cut out their lowercase letter f crafts, then decorated them with feathers, flowers and flamingos.

For the uppercase F, the children glued on a frog catching a fly - an awesome follow up for the book Jump, Frog, Jump! by Robert Kalan.

 This group of kiddos isn't ready to work on hundreds charts yet, but when the oldest children are, we'll reread the book, and make these fun mystery pictures that I recently created:
If your children love the story, please check out the activity on my Teachers Pay Teachers store!

 We had a friend turn four this week - more letter F words, plus a baking and eating activity - win win win for us!

Finally, I'm including some of our hand and foot print art.  If you'd like to see more of our artwork, please check us out on Artsonia.com: a free, online gallery of student artwork.

We also did our fire drill, played with fire fighter puzzles, and made friendship fruit salad - and I'll blog about that tomorrow!