A cool collection of Cc activities

 Let's continue our letter Cc explorations! (If you missed the first installment, see it here.)

Activity #6 Castle and Sun collage creation.

Castle and Sun is a famous painting by Paul Klee (pronounced Clay) that I like to show the children during our letter Cc week.  The colors are bold, and it's made entirely of geometric shapes, so it's perfect to review squares, rectangles, triangles and circles.  What shapes can they see in the picture?  What does it look like to them?  Are there any doors or windows?  Turrets? (Use those great vocabulary words, you'll be amazed how many your children remember and use correctly!)

After we look at the picture, we build (construct!) castles with blocks, and I ask which part of their castles they build first.  Turns out you start at the bottom and work your way up - a concept I want them to think about BEFORE we make our paper collages.

 Check out all the geometric shapes in our blocks, just like we saw in Castle and Sun.  Hmm... what shapes do they see?

Finally I give the children a pile of squares, rectangles and triangles plus 1 circle (the sun), and they construct a collage from the bottom of the page up.  They already know the sun goes up in the sky, they're pretty smart you know!

If you and your child are practicing shapes, you might also like these hands on learning activities I've created.  This is Sorting and Drawing 2D Shapes:

 ...and this is Patterns with 2D Shapes. 

But wait, there's more! (Sesame Street wasn't the only TV I watched.)  Activity #7: Cat hats

Get ready for cuteness overload with this super simple cat hats!  I took a sheet of black construction paper and cut a long strip to go around each child's head.  (Pro tip, when you staple it, make sure the smooth side of the staple is on the inside against your child's head so it doesn't poke, scratch, or snag their hair).  We cut out and glued / stapled the nose and ears on, then crept around or crouched like cats.  Too cute! 

 Watch a quick how-to video here.

Activity #8 Painting with toy cars.

Paint or stamp pads + cars + paper = happy children.  It's easy, it's fun, why not?

Activity #9: Cow collage.  

The link above is to the French language site where this adorable cow idea came from.  You may think this multi-step art project will be too much for your littles, but the artistic ability of children has often amazed me!

Step 1: Children use crayons to draw flowers around the edge of their page.  It's important to use crayons because the next step is...

Step 2: Watercolor paint resist.  Children paint over the entire paper with one color of watercolor paint.  Look how the crayons resist the water, and it soaks into the paper around them, leaving the crayon pictures beautiful and bright!

Step 3: When the paper is dry, cut a rectangle from brown paper.  Have your child draw a smaller rectangle to cut out (the space between the cow's legs), then cut along the lines to make the cow.  From the little scrap rectangle they can make a tail.  Provide scraps of another color to make the rectangle nose and mouth (there are those shape words again!), plus horns and a tuft on the end of the tail.  They can add white circles for the eyes, and add the details for the face.  It's amazing to me that these were made by 3-5 year old children!  

I'd also love to see what YOUR child makes - if you post on social media, please tag me @paulabeckerman2399 or on FaceBook Paula's Primary Classroom.

 Activity #10 Songs!

We HAVE to have songs, right?  For Grandfather's Clock I like to tap rhythm sticks.  As they recite this rhyme children get to experience 3 different tempos for the music, and they're practicing self restraint to match my speed.  If you don't have rhythm sticks you can get the same effect with a couple of wooden spoons, or a pair of chopsticks.  Get creative!

 While you have your sticks (or improvised instruments) out, let's tap on our shoes for Cobbler Cobbler.  A cobbler is a job we don't see often any more, it's what we call someone who makes and fixes shoes.  We practice tapping to a rhythm, and the concepts of up and down in this fun rhyme:

Cobbler, cobbler, mend my shoe,  (tap on your shoes)

Have it done by half past two.

Stitch it up,  (tap sticks above your head)

Stitch it down,  (tap sticks on the floor)

Make the finest shoes in town.  (tap on your shoes)

Sneaking Cat Rhyme is one I found on Literary Hoots Cat Storytime.  Check it out, there are LOTS more fun cat rhymes and activities for cat loving children to enjoy!  It can be made even more fun by wearing the headband from activity #7.

 What other children's songs and rhymes can you think of for the letter Cc?  Let me know in the comments, and maybe I'll record them and add them to my YouTube channel for you!

 

Spider songs and activities

With so many schools closing due to COVID-19, I've been thinking of parents and children who may be stuck at home trying to figure out how to teach and learn together.  Here's my way to help: Story Time Online with Paula.  I hope you find these videos and ideas helpful, and that you'll share them with others who might like them too!  Today let's learn about spiders!

You know about the Itsy Bitsy Spider, but do you know about the Great Big Hairy Spider?  My kiddos LOVE this silly variation!



How else could you rework it with the things you have on hand.... how about the big brown horse climbed up on the barn, or the knight in shining armor climbed up a castle wall?  Get silly and have fun making up your own versions with your children - they'll be using their imaginations and working on rhyming words!

For the preschool crowd, consider making an Itsy Bitsy Spider sensory bin like this one:


Of course, There's A Spider On the Floor is always fun:



Don't have any toy spiders to use as you sing the song?  I searched my toy box and couldn't find a single one this morning, so I made my own.  Here are simple instructions in case your child would like to make their own spider too!



How else could you follow up these spider songs? Here are a couple of my thoughts:



You may also like our Anansi the Spider activity,  these fun spider snacks and our Very Busy Spider retelling activity.

Thanks for stopping by!  If you have requests for songs or stories you'd like me to record, let me know, I'd love to hear from you!

Nursery Rhymes

It's been several months since I blogged.  I've fully intended to, and it really surprised me to find myself without a clue what to write about, now that I don't have a class full of kiddos anymore.   It's definitely different, being a teacher without a class, and without all the normal creative supplies that I guess I haven't been without in 21 years.  You know, simple things like paint and blocks and toys.  I probably could, and maybe should, write about the process of letting go of those things, and how much more of me went along with them than I realized.  Who would have thought that the creative side of me depended upon having paint in the cabinet and small children running around?  

Anyway, I have been working away hard on my Teachers Pay Teachers store, and love it!  It's a different kind of creativity, one that uses the computer rather than paper and glue, and while I am very excited about the things I'm creating there, I don't want my blog to be just an extension of my store.  You don't come here for that, or at least, not only for that!  Teaching and learning ideas is what this blog needs to focus on, so I've been at a blogging stand still.  Until now.

This morning I realized that I want to share my TpT creations AND other teaching ideas, and I have enough photos of children and their projects to last a very long time!  Today I want to share ideas around Nursery Rhymes - some I've written about before, and others are brand new.  I hope you find something you can use with your children!

Humpty Dumpty 

I wrote before about a fun egg dropping activity I found at Mrs Kelly's Kindergarten.  She recommends hard boiling an egg, then predicting whether it will break when dropped on different surfaces, and testing to find out.  The children LOVED this activity!

I'll let you in on a secret - this doesn't end well for Humpty!

The Muffin Man
I've always had the children make muffins and a Muffin Man book when we learn about the letter M.  I simply typed up an opening page with the rhyme on it, then each child filled in their name and a type of muffin on their pages, which went:  _____ is the muffin girl/boy, muffin girl/boy, muffin girl/boy, who likes _______ muffins.  If you want the pages already typed up and printed for you, it is included in my Class Books For Every Letter of the Alphabet.

 

The Queen of Hearts

Q is such a difficult letter to find things for, so we have always taken full advantage of The Queen of Hearts nursery rhyme!  The Missing Tarts by B. G. Hennessy is a fun book to use, as the characters search for the tarts through many different nursery rhymes, and a recipe is included in the book.

 We liked to dress up as royal characters, and we have been lucky enough to be visited by HRH the Queen (a neighbor and personal friend of mine), for whom we practiced our best manners, and made the tarts.  The children love it when adults join on in the pretend!

This Little Piggy or To Market To Market

I created this cute piggy craft for International Mud Day, but it would work well with a piggy nursery rhyme too if you changed the words you put with it.  Adults traced the circles for the body, head and snout, triangles for ears, and squares for legs, then the children cut them out.  Half a pipe cleaner curled around a pencil made a nice little piggy tail!

 Five Little Ducks, or Six Little Ducks That I Once Knew
There are so many possibilities!  The duck hand print is fairly self explanatory, and the construction paper ducks were very simple: I provided either adult or baby duck shapes, and the children tore construction paper scraps (strengthen those little fingers!) and glued them on.  Don't forget to incorporate real animals when you can!

Jack Be Nimble
This is another nursery rhyme that lends itself to a class book.  _______ be nimble, _____ be quick, _____ jump over the candlestick!  As you can see, our candle stick was the non-flammable kind, but that didn't bother the children at all.  It's not every day that the teacher invites you to run and jump inside!

Mary Had a Little Lamb
This one is also included in my class book set mentioned above.  _____ had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb.... so easy, and who doesn't like stuffed animals?  Don't have a sheep?  Ask the parents, or try garage sales, it's amazing what you can find!

 
I've also mentioned this one before, it's available for FREE here! I made two versions, one with a picture to color, and this one for us to paint our own sheep on.  I provided the black head shape and eyes after the children finger painted their colorful sheep.  It amazes me how different each sheep is when we make this, and the children love reading the books they helped to make.

The Itsy Bitsy Spider

Okay, I'll admit it, I don't think this one is included in any of the Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme collections, but every child knows it and loves it, so I'm going to include it!  I found this idea in Mailbox Magazine several years ago.  It's simply a house shape, with a bendy-end straw as a waterspout, with a Halloween spider ring slipped onto it.  A little tape at the top and bottom of the straw so the spider doesn't get lost, and as you can see, the children loved to sing the song and act it out.  Coloring our houses and moving the spider were fine motor workouts, and with the song added in we have literacy and vocabulary development too.  Not too bad for a bendy straw and a plastic spider!

If you have children who are learning to read, I do have one more fun nursery rhyme activity to share with you:  My Nursery Rhyme Sentence Picture Match has 12 simple sentences and pictures for young readers to pair up.  It makes a fun center activity, and there is a follow up worksheet included.  My kindergarteners last year LOVED my sentence picture matching activities, and inspired me to start making more of these activities.    






Of course there are many, many other nursery rhyme ideas that I haven't touched on.  I have some pinned to my Nursery Rhyme Pinterest board,
and I'm always on the lookout for more fun teaching ideas.  Do you have a favorite nursery rhyme activity you'd like to share?  I'd love to hear from you!

Baa Baa Colorful Sheep, The Very Busy Spider, and a pig book.

 This week I posted my first item to my Teachers Pay Teachers Store!  It's a remake of a class book I've been doing with my class for several years, Baa Baa Black Sheep.  It's a FREEBIE, so teachers, please go download it here.  If you find it useful, I would appreciate you rating it! 

Here's the cover... and some samples of the pages the children made.

 Don't you love the crazy, jumping sheep?  Not what I envisioned, but several of the kiddos made their sheep jumping sideways!  They painted the sheep body with their finger tips, then glued on a construction paper head and eyes, and drew on legs.

 Like anything else they have a part of creating, they are eager to read the books we make as a class.  They have been singing variations on Baa Baa Black Sheep a lot this week.  One afternoon we over heard one child singing as she washed her hands, "Baa Baa yellow fish, have you any... eyebrows?  I don't know, I don't know, if you have wool."  Sometimes they crack me up!

Another of the stories we've been reading for our farm theme is Eric Carle's The Very Busy Spider. 

We watched a short animated video of the book on youtube.com: (see it here) and I made a flannel board for the children to retell the story and act it out.

 I cut notches into the sides of some small paper plates, and the children threaded brown yarn through the slots to create a web effect.  Construction paper scraps and a little glue, and we had spiders in our webs too.

We also made a pig book this week.  The kiddos cut out circles, rectangles and triangles that I'd traced on pink, tan and brown paper, and then assembled their shape piggies.  I was inspired by this craft, which I found via pinterest.com.  (I've also made a printable version, if you'd like to do this too!)

 I offered several different short sentences for the children to assemble on their piggy page: My pig is _____ (cute, in the mud, pink, brown, tan).  The children had to use their beginning reading skills to find the correct words and construct their sentence.

Check them out, aren't they adorable?  The children were very proud of their piggies, so I recorded each child reading their own piggie page, and made this youtube video  to share with their families. One mommy told me she listened and thought they sounded like angels!

With all these fun farm activities completed, we're ready for our grand finale - a trip to the farm!