Fabulous fantastic foot prints for Ff

Okay, so only the frog is a foot print... you could definitely make Frankie from a foot print too!   If you haven't yet tried painting your child's foot, you definitely should - but maybe I should give you a few tips first.

Number 1: You need wipes handy.  You probably don't want those little feet running through the house spreading paint everywhere.  Gather everything you need before you start!

Number 2: Work over a hard and washable floor surface. 

Number 3: Sit in chairs facing each other.  It's best if your child has a child sized chair (or a step stool or something else low to sit on).

Number 4: Give them a heads up that it might tickle - and be prepared to take the time to giggle and wiggle a little bit!

Number 5: Put the paper you want to print on down on the floor between you and your child, and know that their heel will be towards them, toes towards you.  If you've written "F is for frog" on your page, you want the words to be facing you so the frog is right side up.  Unless your child wants an upside down frog, in which case I say go for it!

Another fun letter Ff activity is to make a fall sensory bin.

It's possible that I am an overachiever, and that I had 15 years of teaching to collect all this junk treasure. Do what works for YOU!  I had several scarecrow and pumpkin crafty looking things that students gave me over the years, so in they went.  The green and orange leaf trays came from the dollar store, as did a giant red felt maple leaf.  I had pompons on hand, and found the tiny pumpkins and leaves at a garage sale... You might have real fall leaves, mini pumpkins and pine cones, you could also use dry corn as a base for your bin. (I use feed corn and do it outside so squirrels and birds eat what we spill and it isn't wasted).  Get creative - let your child help!  

Another favorite activity for Ff is fish hats.

Click the link above to get full details, including the silly backstory, a link to a song you'll never get out of your head, credit for the idea, and a pattern for your own fish hats.

I keep thinking this hat would be a great reward system, if I had the children earn each scale.  Try a new food?  Get a scale.  Cleaned your room?  Get a scale.  Used your manners? Get a scale!  If there's something you've been working on with your little one, perhaps you can entice them to keep at it with a fish hat reward?  Let me know if you try this, and how it goes!

Books

Of course we need books!!  #AllTheBooks #IWantThem #PictureBooks  #NotAddicted .  I'm going to make this a list, because there are always too many for me to take pictures of... but not too many to read!

 

Have a wonderful week exploring the letter Ff with your child, and stop back next Sunday for ideas for Letter Gg!                                                                        Hugs!

                                                                                        Paula

                                                                                         

                 

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!

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!

Fish hats, fish hats, roly poly fish hats

 A couple of years ago I had a student who pronounced the letter f with a "b" sound.  One morning she came in singing a new song: "Bish eds, bish eds, oly oly bish eds.  Bish eds, bish eds, eat dem up yum!"  I had no idea what she was singing, but another parent recognized it as "Fish Heads" by Barnes and Barnes, so we all watched it, and it became a sort of class song.

I was tickled to find an idea for a fish hat recently, at www.abbythelibrarian.com, and had to use it for our letter f review day.  The original author even included a reference to "Fish Heads", so how could I resist?

Here is my modified version.  I used 12" x 18" construction paper to make our fish, as I had some on hand.  I drew out a fish shape, making sure the body of the fish was about 12 inches long - I wanted to be sure that two fish bodies would fit all the way around the children's heads.  From all the scraps my assistant and I cut lots of circles to represent scales.

Each child decorated two fish, one facing left, the other facing right.  They glued the scales on in an overlapping pattern.  We needed many more scales than I had anticipated - if you decide to do this project, expect each child to need about 40 - 50 large scales.  

 We stapled a sentence strip to fit each child's head, then stapled on their fish.  **When you staple, be sure to put the smooth side of the staple to the inside so the sharp ends are away from kids' heads.**

 When everyone was ready, we watched Fish Heads one more time, and sang along in our own fish heads.  Aren't they adorable?!

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!