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!

S is for Santa, of course!

It is December, and the kiddos are ever so ready for Christmas!  We focused on the letter S this week, so of course, Santa had to come into the picture, regularly!  Our upper case S craft had a Santa hand print on it, but the very most fun "Santa" activity was dressing up!

Several years ago I bought a large kid sized red fleece top, and red pants.  I added white fleece around the cuffs and hems, added an old black belt, a fun fur beard, Santa hat, and my own black snow boots, and voila!  We have a Santa costume.

 Not everything was about Santa, of course.  We still did a lot of regular activities, like practicing writing our names on the ipad.  The kiddos are using Writing Wizard, which allowed me to enter their names and other words to practice. 

 We also worked hard on more ornaments for our parents this week, in preparation for our class Christmas party.  I love the snowmen CDs, which I found on happyhooligans.ca from November 29, 2013.  I painted old CDs with white acrylic paint ahead of time, and the children added button eyes, black bean mouths, and a twisted square of orange tissue paper for the noses.  Super cute!  The only difficulty was that when I stacked the CDs, some of them stuck together.  Next time I'll put a piece of wax paper between them.

  Here are our hand print choices for this week: Santa, swans, and snails.  You can see all our hand and foot print art ideas on my handprint alphabet pinterest board.

We had some beautiful days this week, and took advantage of it to get lots of outside time.  The kiddos were so adorable, here are some of their favorite outside play choices:

Drawing, coloring and writing at our outside table...

Playing on the swings.  Swinging on their tummies is ever popular, and since every child I've met wants to do it, it must feed some kind of a need.  These two were super cute holding hands and swinging side to side together!

Running, chasing, playing...

 The kiddos were fascinated by the jack-o-lantern pumpkins rotting in the dormant veggie garden.  I watched them run up and poke at them, to see how soft they had become, and realized this one was ready to split open. I didn't want it to eventually mush under anyone's prodding, so I poked a hole in it, and opened it up for the kids to see.  Everyone wanted to look, and I had to ask them to not pick out the seeds from the rotting pumpkin!

Do you wonder what secrets these two are sharing? So sweet!

Then came the biggest event for the week, our Christmas party, complete with a visit from a certain jolly old guy!

 Several times a day for the last two weeks, I've read the children one of my books of The Night Before Christmas.  Every time, I make the same hand motions for the kiddos, and they have all memorized most or all of the poem!  We start our Christmas party each year by reciting it to our parents.  Needless to say, the children who have been with me for several holiday seasons know it really well!  Our moms and dads were very impressed!

Before our party, we talked about gift etiquette; looking at the giver, saying thank you, and making a positive comment about the gift - even if it is just to notice the color or to acknowledge the thought behind the gift.  So often our kiddos are overwhelmed with gifts, and tear through them.  Taking the time to be appreciative is important!

Julie and I give each child a small gift to keep. This year the kiddos got a small stuffed animal.

The second gift the children open is something to stay at school for us all to enjoy.  We got new books, some puzzles, and stuffed animals!

Do you remember being a child?  One thing I remember is my love of paper, any kind of paper!  After we had opened our gifts, we gathered up the paper to save for crafts the next day.  Used fancy wrapping paper with snowmen and shiny sparkles is "trash" to most adults, but to the children, it is treasure!  They cut it, pasted on it, and decorated it like crazy the day after our party!

 Our gifts to our parents is all the ornaments we've made.  I treasure the Rudolph ornaments my boys made with their hand and foot prints when they were small, the popsicle stick snowmen, and paper gingerbread men... I hope our parents all find these as precious as I do! 

Then Santa came to see us!  A few of the children weren't too sure about him, but most were thrilled to have him visit. 

 Before the party, I prepped plates with candy, green frosting, a plastic knife (to spread the frosting), and an ice cream cone.  Turning these ingredients into Christmas trees was our culminating activity, and it was wonderful!  I found the idea here, and all over pinterest.com!

As you can see, the children were very engaged with this project!  (Gee, candy, sugar cones, and a craft project all in one, wonder what attracted them?)

Happy Holidays!  I hope your Christmas, or whatever holiday you celebrate, is as sweet as can be!