Gg is the greatest for your guy or gal!

 Here we are in October, looking at the letter Gg - which is GREAT because gourds, goblins, ghosts and googly eyes are all over the place in the weeks before Halloween!  Shall we get going?!

Let's start with one of my all time favorite letter G activities: reading Go Away, Big Green Monster by Ed Emberly, and making our own Big Green Monsters. I've blogged about it here before, but in case you missed it, Big Green Monster disappears one feature at a time as you turn the pages of the book.  I love to have my students paint a big green blob face, and add the features on as we reread the book in a small group.  Not only are we rereading the book, the children really learn the sequence of the story, and can retell it with me (and without me)!  There are lots of color words, and plenty of chances for expressive reading!

Another favorite letter G activity is our Googly Eye pictures and class book!

Chocolate + being silly + sticking out our tongues + taking photos = fun!

This next idea is one I haven't talked about before: making shoe box guitars.  A quick YouTube search found this really cool video, and clearly I'm not going to do it better than PlayKids did! Check it out! 

My area to shine is singing silly songs, and this is one my grandmother sang to me:

 

Do YOU know any little girls like this? ;-)

Want to play games to practice listening for the letter Gg?  Check this hands on activity pack out in my TeachersPayTeachers store!

Making hand prints for each letter is a tradition at my preschool, so here are some fun ideas: ghosts, gorillas, and giraffes!  Notice that the g in giraffe makes a different sound than it does in the other pictures, and talk about it with your little one.  This is the 'soft g' sound, which sounds more like J.  Sometimes letters are tricky!

How about cooking?  Are you and your little ones enjoying time in the kitchen each week?  Cooking  involves lots of math concepts like measuring, counting, temperatures and time, so it's a natural way to include math in your days - and even more importantly, as your child learns to cook they are developing life skills!  Consider making grilled cheese sandwiches for the letter Gg: your child can spread butter on the bread, and stack the bread and cheese ready to cook.  You'll want to do the cooking part until your little ones are old enough to avoid getting burned - but while you're doing that, they can put grapes (another great G food) on the plates, and set the table with the right number of napkins for everyone who is eating.

Not a grilled cheese fan?  Do you like Green Eggs and Ham?  

A little green food coloring can change a meal into a book adventure!  Add it to your eggs before cooking, and if you fry up some ham, add green food coloring in a little water, and cook it off - the ham will stay green!

It wouldn't be letter Gg week without getting out the glitter glue!  Does your little prefer green or gold?  Is it goopy? Or gooey? Either way, it sure is great! 

Finally, I'll leave you with a simple craft project that will have your child talking about primary colors (red, yellow, blue), shapes (circles, squares, rectangles) and counting (gumballs). 

 

Have a good, great, gorgeous week!  See you next week for the letter Hh!

Goodness Gracious, it's G!

I've mentioned my youtube.com playlists before,  but writing about the letter G makes me remember that I must mention them again.  As a teacher of young children, I try to use kid friendly language all the time, so the phrase "Goodness gracious, great balls of fire" is something I say to them fairly often.  Hopefully most adults reading this blog recognize it, and I'm not dating myself too much - I'm a bit nervous now that I think about that! - but of course the kiddos aren't familiar with Jerry Lee Lewis' famous hit.  That's where Youtube comes in! Here's a link to my letter G playlist.

As we always do, we worked on our upper and lower case letter crafts this week, making green glitter lower case g's, and ghostly uppercase G's.  We read Jack Prelutsky's Halloween Countdown, featuring ghosts, and learned about jump tales.

 

We had several choices for our letter G handprints this week, and of course made pages for our abc photo album. 

Would you like a sneak peek at the photos we took for the letter G page in our albums?  Maybe you saw the blog about going to Green's for gourds this week, and thought those would be good G pictures.  Well, they would, but those aren't my favorite letter G pictures.  I like GOOGLY EYES!

Every year we pose with chocolate eyeballs; it's one of the activities the children remember from year to year, and ask for.  We make a class book with pictures of all of us posing, and it is a favorite read all year long.  

If you would like to make a copy of the book for your class, the cover and student page is available on Teachers Pay Teachers .  This would also be a cute activity to do at a classroom Halloween or fall festival party, taking pictures and putting together a class book - before eating the eyeballs, of course!  

Have a wonderful Halloween, and check back next week for more Halloween activities, and of course, the letter H!

Gourds at Green's

 One of my favorite field trips to do in October is to go to a local green grocer, and to enjoy their incredible variety of pumpkins and gourds.

 Most children, and a lot of adults too, think that pumpkins are all orange, the kind of jack-o-lantern pumpkins we see in every grocery store at this time every year. 

 Check these out!  Long pumpkins, round pumpkins, blue, green, white pumpkins...

 ... bumpy pumpkins, pumpkins shaped like pears...

 ... brightly colored and crazy shaped decorative gourds ...

 You can tell the children have fun on this trip!

 Even corn comes in different colors!  We found yellow, orange, red, purple, black, white and brown kernals!

 I appreciate the way everything is set up just right for pictures, and the wonderful variety of gourds available.

 Yes, we took some home with us!  You'll see our jack-o-lantern pumpkin in a few weeks when we carve it for the letter J, and of course we have some pie pumpkins, ready for Thanksgiving, and an abundance of muffins.  Yum!

Good Golly, it's letter G

 We had a new sensory play experience this week, just for the letter Gg: ghost dough!  I found the idea at http://www.growingajeweledrose.com, and knew the kiddos would love it!  I put some baking soda into a pie pan for them, added some shaving cream, and they mixed and formed it and squished it around.  There were buttons and beads to add to create ghostly faces.  The kiddos really enjoyed it, but I think the pie plates were limiting.  I think next year we'll put it directly on the table!

 BOO!

One of my all time favorite stories for kiddos is Go Away Big Green Monster, by Ed Emberly.  Each year we read the book, and as a follow up, make our own monsters.  The kiddos squish green paint in the fold of heavy paper to create the symmetrical face, then add the features right into the wet paint as we retell the story together.  Each monster seems to have it's own unique personality!

 

Another annual event is taking our photos with chocolate googly eyes.  We'll make a book with photos of everyone showing their googly eyed faces, with the simple text, "____ has googly eyes."  Again, the kids LOVE it!

 We make graphs several times a week, and this was no exception.  As you can see, giraffes were a fave this week, maybe because we had just finished making our hand print giraffes when we did this graph.

Here's a math manipulative for the letter Gg: geoboards.   We pull these out some days after lunch, in between taking turns in the bathroom.  The children stretch rubber bands over the pegs on the board to form various shapes.  (Several kiddos made parallel lines this time, so you may hear a new vocabulary word if you ask your child about it.)

 We also had a fantastic field trip to Mrs. Lowes' Farm this week.  If we'd gone last week, I would have emphasized the /f/ sound of farm, and if it was next week, we would have focused on /h/ for hayride.  We did get to see, pat and feed goats, but truly, what the kiddos will remember is touching the many animals, playing farm themed games, and the hayride.  They were so gentle, and enjoyed the farm so much, we will definitely go back again next fall!

 

 Something I am trying to focus on more this year, is doing more art with the children.  You can see more of our artwork in our school gallery at our Artsonia.com gallery.  Each child chose to make either a ghost or a giraffe hand print, and we all made gumball machines.

  This is one of my new art projects, and it came from http://onecrayolashort.blogspot.com.  Wayne Thiebaud is an American artist who frequently painted dessert items.  This project is inspired by his Three Machines.

 We had a second field trip this week; we went to Green's Produce for gourds - which is another fancy word for pumpkins.  Did you know pumpkins are not always orange, or round, or smooth?  We saw bumpy pumpkins, flat ones, long ones, green ones, white ones, some with red and green, some pink ones... there are a LOT of different kinds!  We bought 6 cool ones to decorate our entrance with, and a dozen little ones for the kiddos to decorate next week.  My favorite thing about the pumpkins is cooking and eating them!  After Halloween, I will start baking pumpkins, making pumpkin puree with the flesh, and freezing it ready for our pumpkin cooking.  I'll make plenty of pumpkin muffins, pumpkin smoothies, pumpkin soup, and pumpkin pies for us to eat at school during the winter months, and the children will each make their own pumpkin pie to take home for Thanksgiving.  Our pumpkins are well loved!  With crazy amounts of vitamin A, C, fiber and minerals, they are a healthy addition to our meals too!

 

This last activity has nothing to do with the letter Gg, but was such a hit, I have to share it with you.  I've been incorporating more sensory play into my curriculum this year, and found this one at http://www.growingajeweledrose.com.  This is Eucalyptus scented pasta.  So many of us are experiencing allergies right now, and when I saw the idea, I knew the scent would help clear our noses.  I just happened to have Eucalyptus oil on hand, so I made up a batch.  The cardboard slides were packing in a box recently, which I kept, knowing they would be good for something fun.  We rolled large acorns, which we collected at the zoo last week, down the slides with the pasta, and had an awesome time.  This kind of play is great for developing fine motor skills, cooperating with friends, experiencing different textures and scents, and the repetitive nature of the play is soothing and calming.  The children went back to this activity over and over.  I think next week I'll add some Halloween themed items to make it new all over again!