How to make a Haunted House Letter H

 

 

What could be better for a Halloween letter study than H - for haunted house?!

That's right, this week we're going to start with our letter crafts!  I like to use black and purple paper to make our Haunted Houses, to go along with the Halloween feel.  You'll also need some Halloween cut outs - foam stickers or die cut shapes are easy, and of course scissors and glue.  If you have a flying bat shape to hand from the eaves of your house, you'll also need a needle and thread.

First cut out the uppercase H.  Make two pieces of roof with the narrowest part that is as wide as the uprights on your H.  Cut some crooked rectangles for doors and windows. 

Fold back about a half inch along the sides of each window, and along the top of each roof piece.  Your child will glue only on the folded part, so the windows and doors can hang partly open, and the roof will extend from the house.  Add black cats, ghosts and pumpkins behind each window or door, and if you're hanging a bat from the roof, use a needle and thread to attach it. Ta-da! One haunted house for Halloween!

There are a couple of other ways I like to introduce the Hh sound - one is to put things that start with H in a hat, and have the children name them as I pull them out, emphasizing the Hh sound.  We lay them on a letter H to help make the connection between the sound and the letter.  Items (real or toy) that you might have include horse, hotdog, hats, ham, hammer, hammerhead, hairdryer, hippo and heart.  What else can you and your littles find?

Another fun way to introduce H is to have students ride a hobby horse around a toy house while wearing a hat - lots of letter H things there!  I offer a selection of dress up hats, and let each child take a turn to choose a hat and ride the horse.  As they do, we all sing (to the tune of She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain) "Ride a horse around a house and wear a hat. /H/ /H/"

Don't have a hobby horse?  Make one!  I've seen hobby horses made with a paper bag stuffed with scrunched up newspaper and a paper towel tube "stick" to ride, but my favorite is a variation on our unicorn craft.  You'll need some poster board or other stiff cardboard, and a paint stirrer or ruler, plus yarn for a mane, and whatever craft supplies your child wants to decorate their hobby horse.

Cut out 2 identical horse head shapes (a quick internet search for horse head silhouette brings up lots).  Staple them together.  Hole punch down the back of the neck where the mane will go (this takes a lot of hand strength and is probably a grown up job).  Have your child help you cut 10"-12" lengths of yarn to loop through each hole to create the mane.  Draw one eye on each side of the horse head (children almost always want 2 eyes on each face, so you may have some vaguely creepy horses) and let your child color the horse however they see fit.  Insert the end of the paint stirrer / ruler and you have your very own hobby horse!

For math skills this week, compare how heavy things are.  Have your child gather items to compare, then hold one item in each hand.  Which one do they think is heavier?  If you have a balance scale it's easy to have them check to see if they were right.  This simple comparison is the beginning of learning to measure!

If you'd like to use this as a math center it's available in my TeachersPayTeachers store, but you can also just compare and explore without the task cards - do what works for you and your little ones!

For your hand print crafts this week you could go a couple of different ways.  Stick with our usual representative hand prints and make a hedgehog or a hippo (that's tissue paper "water" added after the paint is dry)...

...or get into Pop Art and make a Warhol style hand print creation from Artolazzi!

Look up Andy Warhol's work on your computer or in a book, and notice the repetitive prints in bold colors.  If you do this project at home try to get all your family members involved - this looks nice with just the 4 hand prints from one person, but put several sets together and it is super impressive!   

- Choose 4-6 colors of paper and stick with them throughout to make a cohesive project.

- Cut your paper into halves or quarters (halves for adults, quarters for children).  Each person needs 4 pieces for the background.

- Make the paper hands in contrasting colors.  Trace a hand on a piece of paper, staple 4 papers together (staples outside of the hand prints so you cut them off), and cut out 4 identical copies of the hand print.  

- Arrange the hand prints on the background papers, making sure to contrast each background and hand.  When satisfied, glue them on.

- Paint your hand black.  Make a print on each hand cut out.

-Arrange the 4 prints in a line or rectangle, and use tape on the back to join them together. 

I didn't invent a cooking project for Hh, and I'm not sure I've done one with my students.  (Insert surprised look here, I think I dropped the ball on this one!)  Not to worry, if you're enjoying cooking for each letter you may enjoy these no-cook horse cookies or these "hippo-tatoes".

 

For more letter h ideas, check out my letter h pinterest board too!  There are crafts for hippos, hedgehogs and hens, a variation on making your own chia pet for silly hair, mixing paint and bubbles to make gorgeous hydrangeas, blowing paint for hair, plus ideas for Hickory Dickory Dock and Humpty Dumpty!

I can't wait to see what you get up to this week!  Remember to tag me on Instagram @PaulaBeckerman2399 and FaceBook Paula's Primary Classroom if you post pictures, and if you're enjoying my ideas follow me too!

Have an awesome week everyone!

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!

Hooray for Hh

 We began this week by pulling items that start with Hh out of a heart bag left over from Valentines, and then wore hats and rode hobby horses.  The kiddos always love this activity!

 I also made a new sensory bin with a Halloween theme.  I used black, orange, green and purple pompons, plastic spiders and rats, the eucalyptus pasta that I wrote about last week, and Halloween favors that I picked up cheaply last year on November 1st.  This bin has been played with almost constantly all week, the children enjoy picking out their favorite items (the baby rats are very popular).  This is a lovely, calming activity for many of them, and develops their fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination as they play.  They're also practicing classification and sorting skills when they collect similar items, and there is a lot of language development as they talk about what they are doing, and Halloween in general.  They all have a lot to say about Halloween!

 Another fun way to work on math skills this week was sorting Halloween themed foam shapes.  I've made up some game boards to facilitate this play: sorting big and little...

 ...sorting by color...

... and recognizing and continuing patterns.  One of the wonderful things about these activities is that once I made them, they are ready to use for many years, by many many kiddos.  We don't need work sheets to learn skills!  Hands on activities are better, more engaging, and far more developmentally appropriate for young children.  We work with patterns and sorting in a lot of different ways, and almost every day, so the kiddos were able to complete these activities independently, and feel successful with a new and exciting activity.

It was very stormy for most of Monday, but in the afternoon the rain slowed to a drizzle, and we were all ready to get outside and burn off some energy.  We had a nature treasure hunt.  I gave each child a small sack, and we walked through my yard and along the street to search for pretty leaves, fallen flowers, and acorns.  Several children told me it was the best day ever!

 It got even better when we went back inside and used home made dough to hold our treasures!  I added some mini pumpkins to the mix, which made cool impressions in the dough.

A logical extension of this activity for the kindergarteners, was to sort the treasures I had collected for them (they took their own treasures home).

Next, we looked at photos of madalas made with natural materials, which I found with a web search.  They were beautiful, and full of math too.  We noticed that mandalas have repeating patterns, and that we needed greater amounts of small items to go around the circle than of larger items.  As we continue working with these, we'll see how we use multiples of the same number as we arrange them.

 Can you imagine the careful work the children did to make these, the fine motor skills they worked on, and the conversations about shape and size and color of these beautiful materials?  By noticing where to find different shaped leaves and acorns, the children are building an ecological identity too - coming to know their school and neighborhood better, learning to value their piece of the world.  This activity encompasses art too, and provided amazing sensory experiences. 

Another art experience for another rainy day, was to thread foam shapes and beads onto pipe cleaners, and to stick those firmly into a recycled styrofoam base.  Once again, fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination was practiced.  You can see more of our art work here.

Thursday was "hat day".  We read some books about hats, played with my collection of hats, and made our own party hats.  The kiddos decorated the hat while it was still flat.  This is how to make one, if you'd like to try it too.  I showed the children how to curl a pipe cleaner around and around their finger, to make a swirl that sticks up, and they chose curling ribbon to hang down.  I stapled those in before rolling the hat into a cone shape.  You can also see our Haunted House H craft in the background of this photo!  The windows flap open, and there are spooky stickers hiding behind them.

One of our friends turned 4 this week, so she chose two friends to help her bake her birthday cupcakes.  This friend had never cracked an egg before.  Look at her focus!

I took another group of kiddos to Green's Produce, on Arkansas Lane in Arlington, to check out the gourds and pumpkins, and of course, to take some cute fall photos.  Green's is definitely my favorite pumpkin patch!

The kindergarteners also had a field trip one afternoon, to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth.  Their website is http://www.cartermuseum.org/.  It is a beautiful museum, and free, so even if the kiddos can only handle a short visit, it is well worth it.  This group managed to walk through almost all the exhibits, and learned some fantastic art vocabulary.  We started with landscape, portrait and still life, noticed drawing, painting, photography and sculpture.  We saw a short video about how brass sculptures are made, and saw busts, abstract art, and mobiles.  While we were there, I bought a beautiful children's book, I Spy Shapes In Art, by Lucy Micklethwait, in the gift shop.  By the time we left, the skies were clearing, and we ran and ran in the grass outside, and admired this sculpture before heading home.

The following day I had the children read the book to me - which they could all do - and we learned some 3D shape words as we looked for shapes in the famous art works.  Hmmm... that would be reading, art and math, all in one "lesson", and disguised as fun.

One more awesome project for this week: hand prints in the style of Andy Warhol.  I found the idea via Pinterest, but the original source is createartwithme.blogspot.com.  When I first saw these, I thought they were fantastic, but doing them with the kiddos, and seeing them all lined up?  WOW!  I will definitely be doing this project again in the future!

Earlier this week Ms. Julie and I traced each child's hand, and cut out 4 copies of them in colors of the children's choice.   We pulled rectangles of matching color, so everything was ready for the kiddos to assemble, and then we looked at some of Warhol's repeating images of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe.  We noticed the vibrant colors, and talked about contrasting colors that pop off the page in this "pop"ular art.

The kiddos did a great job of assembling their work, choosing where to place each background rectangle, which color hand to place on each contrasting background, gluing around the perimeter of each piece, determining which hand they needed to paint in order to match the paint to the cut out hand print, and finally rubbing their hands in a tray of paint and printing on the colorful hand prints.

 Check out the finished products!