I love teaching and learning with young children, this is where I share my ideas.
Welcome to Paula's Primary Classroom! This blog is where I share ideas for teaching and learning with families, friends and other early childhood educators. Please don't use the photos or text of this blog without permission, but please do use any ideas you find useful. Thank you for stopping by!
Are your children ready to jump for joy for letter Jj? Let's see if we can wear them out with lots of fun learning activities!
I try to make sure our letter Jj learning happens in late October - because this is prime jack-o-lantern time, and we all love Halloween fun! Here are some of the ways I've used jack-o-lanterns over the years to keep my preschool and kindergarten kiddos learning:
-Make an event out of your jack-o-lantern experience - it doesn't have to be just a quick pumpkin carving activity. I like to start a couple of weeks before Halloween with a trip to our favorite pumpkin patch to check out all the "gourd-geous" pumpkins during letter Gg week.
Did you know pumpkins aren't all orange? Sure, that's what we traditionally see in the grocery store every fall, but the children are always fascinated by all the different sizes, shapes and colors (and later flavors) of pumpkins. I always get a lovely variety for a display, and once Halloween is over I cook them all up for pumpkin muffins and pies... read all about that here and here.
We bring math into our jack-o-lantern experience by having the children suggest shapes for Jack's features, then voting for each feature, and tallying their responses.
I do the cutting, but everyone takes turns to come up and help pull out the "guts". You can call it fibrous strands if you want, but my kiddos LOVE that I call it guts - ewwwww!
We keep the talk about shapes going with a simple felt activity, and the children get to create and recreate jack-o-lanterns all week long.
We work on patterns with pumpkins (not technically jack-o-lanterns, but while we're on the theme let's get in all the math we can!) with a math center I made. Here it's in a pocket chart, but it works on a desk top too.
These math activities include jack-o-lanterns, along with lots of other fun Halloween themes, and we LOVE using the mini erasers from the Target Dollar Spot to complete them!
We mix yellow and red paint to make our orange paintings, and get a fine motor workout cutting and pasting features on our creations.
One of our hand print options for J is actually more of a fist painting of jack-o-lanterns (the other choices are jellyfish and jaguars).
Are your littles jumping for joy yet? No? Try digging out all the jewellery you're willing to let them play with (Mardi Gras beads and plastic jewels are great for this), then turn on some jazz and jump for joy to jazz in your jewellery...
...or head to the zoo and look for animals that jump.
Since J is also for jelly, and learning to write our letters is on the agenda, I introduce writing J with a little jelly on a plate. We start by using our pinky fingers - which is sign language for the letter Jj! They'll practice a lot when it's a matter of writing the J then licking their fingers, then repeating the process.... yum!
We make our upper case J by adding an orange jack-o-lantern on a green letter J, and cover the lower case j with lots of jewels.
What are YOUR favorite activities for letter Jj? Comment here, or tag me in your social media posts: @paulabeckerman2399 on Instagram, and Paula's Primary Classroom on FaceBook. I can't wait to see all the fun things you do!
It's pretty simple really - letter Ii is for ice cream. What more could you possibly need?
Okay, I'll admit, there's more to it than that, but, if you include ice cream in your letter Ii learning this week, I can almost guarantee your child will be thrilled!
There are SO many ways to add ice cream to your learning: you could take a field trip to an ice cream parlor, and find the letter Ii in the signage. YUM! Look how lower case I kind of looks like a cone with a dot of ice cream on top!
You could make home made ice cream. There's some measuring involved, plus reading the recipe, and the science of using salt to keep the ice frozen longer. This post includes my favorite ice cream recipe.
You could pick up a different flavors and predict which each family member will like the best, and make a graph about it - and then taste the flavors and find out which really is each person's favorite.
Add a fine motor aspect by finger painting ice creams - we made our paint with half shaving cream and half paint, which has a lovely airy texture - even when it dries!
We also make a hand print I is for ice cream, with confetti for sprinkles:
Since we've now clearly established that I is for ice cream, why not make a letter craft about it?
As you can see, we also made lower case letter i is for inch worms - so we learned the inch worm song and checked our marigolds to see if we could find any. (We didn't, but it was fun to look!)
Our last ice cream related activity is our sensory bin. I save the empty tubs from our ice cream tasting, wash them, and add them to a huge tub of pompons for pretend ice cream. Add a few scoops, bowls, or empty sprinkle containers, and you have a fun way to work those finger muscles while pretending you're making ice cream!
It's possible you need more ideas for letter Ii week, so here are a couple of other ways to explore Ii. Make symmetrical iris paintings:
It's easy to do, just fold your paper in half, add a drop of each of 3 or 4 colors of paint right in the fold line, then close the paper. Have your child rub and rub the place on the fold where the paint is, then open the paper back up. This is a great time to talk about symmetry, and start looking for things that look the same on one side as the other (like faces, bodies, and even the letter Ii)! If your child enjoys this activity, I have to say that a collection of the paintings makes a stunning art display!
Ii is also for instruments. I've always had groups of preschool children - so I don't offer kazoos or flutes or anything that goes in their mouths. There are plenty of fun percussion instruments - those that you bang on or shake!
It's also easy to make your own instruments - an inverted pot and a wooden spoon makes a good drum, a small container with a lid can be filled with small items to make a shaker, and you can make a kazoo with a piece of wax paper and a comb - go ahead and search it, you'll be amazed how easy it is!
Finally, if it's hot when you're learning about letter Ii, add some ice! (If it's cold, check out this post with wintery ideas.) I like to freeze water in empty recyclable containers (if they break I won't be sad), and then put it in a sensory table outside on a hot day - you don't even have to get the ice out of the containers to keep the children occupied! Figuring out how to get the ice out can be part of the fun. I've seen children stack and build with ice blocks...
For the best effect, freeze this block in stages: put in a little water and a couple of toys (or flowers, or whatever you come up with), wait until that layer is frozen, then add another layer. You can build this up with as many or as few layers as you want, the block shown in the pictures above kept a group of 10 children occupied for almost an hour!
One more fun variation on ice play is to color your ice. I make my own water colors to add to the water before I freeze it by soaking a dried up marker in a little water overnight. All the remaining color in the marker leeches out, making some intensely colored water, which freezes into some gorgeous ice blocks! You can even make layers in different colors - let your child help you imagine all the possibilities! (Read more about ice play in this post from July 2014).
Okay, I guess ice cream really isn't EVERYTHING you need to know about the letter Ii - but it sure is a fun place to start! I hope you and your littles have a lot of fun with these ideas, and I would LOVE to see pictures of all you get up to. If you post pictures online, please please tag me @paulabeckerman2399 on Instagram, or Paula's Primary Classroom on FB. Have an awesome week!
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)...
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!
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!
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!
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!
Are you feeling fabulous about Ff - and all the other letters so far? Preschool learning (and teaching!) is so much fun! Let's jump in and get started!
Make Friendship Fruit Salad
This is the easiest cooking activity EVER! Each year for the letter Ff I would ask each family to send in 1 piece of fruit. No need to assign apples here and bananas there - it truly doesn't matter which fruits you have, or what quantities! This is friendship fruit salad after all - we get to share the making and the eating with our friends.
Since fruit salad also doesn't need any actual cooking, the children can do all the steps! The first part of cooking is ALWAYS washing our hands. The children also washed their fruit, and then used butter knives to cut it up into small pieces. (I do core the apples and pears, and quarter them). Most fruit is soft enough that it is easy to cut with a butter knife, and this is a good time to teach children how to hold the fruit with one hand, and hold the knife with the other. Have a look at these little hands - they all have their index fingers pointed along the knife to help apply pressure, and their fingers safely back from the knife. This is a great early introduction to cutting, and lays the foundation for bigger cooking projects down the road.
Did I mention the eating part? Fruit salad is a healthy snack, and if you and your friends made it together, you know they all want to try it! There's seldom any left over either - this tasty treat gets gobbled right up!
Finding things that start with Ff in our feely box
I'm going to start with the classroom version of a feely box, but I also have a super easy at home version. If you're going to be teaching the letter Ff to a big group of children year after year you might prefer something more sturdy and more educational than if you're teaching your own child only.
My feely box for Ff was a shoe box in a previous life... until I covered it with flower photos, and lined it with fake fur, and filled it with fences, fires, flies, frogs and everything else I could find that starts with Ff.
Here we are taking turns reaching in and finding things that start with Ff to put next to our letter F, all the while making the f sound.
The at home super easy version of the feely box is just that - super easy!
Field trips
I've said it innumerable times, but I'll keep on saying it: children learn best through hands on experiences. If you can get out and explore the world, do. Talk about everything you're seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, hearing and thinking! Your child will learn the big words and big ideas you share with them, and you'll both have fun.
For the letter F some of my favorite suggestions are to go to a farm, see flamingos at the zoo, look for fish and frogs (at an aquarium or zoo, or at the pond), find a fountain and flowers at the botanical gardens. No botanical garden near you? Find a flower shop or just a pretty park! What other field trip ideas can you think of?
Fun on the farm from home
Even if you can't get to a real farm, you can bring out farm themed learning! Do you have a toy farm, or toy farm animals? Let your child sort them, or order them in height. Count how many horses - and find out if there are more sheep or cows.
I'm a huge fan of tangram puzzles, and have an adorable farm set that makes practicing shapes fun.
Make the letter F for your home-made alphabet.
Want to know a secret? It's not SO secret... but I had no idea what I was doing on a lot of my letter crafts when I first decided to do it. I'd seen a few ideas for some letters, and decided to go for the whole alphabet, but.... what to do? That's why the lower case letter f looks like I got into my craft supplies and found everything I could that starts with f: flowers, flamingos and feathers. The bits and bobs you have on hand, left over from long ago craft projects are GOLD to your child. Please don't feel like you have to reproduce someone else's ideas exactly, just do what works for you and your child. :-)
My upper case letter F started with a die cut frog years ago, and that was it - until I saw some plastic flies one Halloween, and bought up a teacher life time supply of them. The frog tongue has been a strip of paper, or a piece of ribbon - either way, our froggy is catching a fly, and it works. For more frog learning activities, hop over to my TeachersPayTeachers store here.
Sing songs
Have you caught on that this is an every week activity? There are always songs to sing, you can do it anywhere, it's free, and it makes you feel good. Let's sing!
That's enough to keep you and your little one super busy for about a month - but I have more letter Ff ideas, so come back on Wednesday for hand prints, a sensory bin, and some very silly fish hats! Until then, enjoy, and remember to tag me if you post about doing any of these activities on social media!
@paulabeckerman2399 on Instagram and Paula's Primary Classroom on FaceBook.
If you've been around my blog for long, you know how much I love children's picture books! It should come as no surprise that I have a list of recommendations for you - and here it is!
This book is delicious! Most books for the letter E are about either elephants or eggs, but this one is about eating vegetables. As always Ehlert's illustrations are gorgeous, and may even inspire your child to try collage art (or a new fruit)!
When the Emperor gives every child a seed, and promises rewards for the best plant grown with it, Ping plants his seed and cares for it carefully, but nothing grows. He feels awful taking his empty pot to show the Emperor, but what happens next is a wonderful surprise! Follow the book by planting and caring for seeds of your own!
Poor Edward the Emu is sick of the zoo, so he tries being other animals, only to discover that being himself suits him best... and it doesn't hurt that the zoo added a second emu, and her name is Edwina! Watch this book on YouTube or borrow it from your library.
I love Keith Baker's illustrations! Did you know he hides something in each picture? In this book every hen has the letters HEN hidden in her feathers - my son LOVED searching for it!
While you're talking about eggs, why not mention lots of egg laying (oviparous) animals that children might not know about? Here are a few of my favorites:
and all the other Elephant and Piggie books too. If you and your little ones haven't read these books yet, you are in for a treat! Elephant and Piggie are best friends in spite of being very different, and every child I've ever read these books with has been hooked! Mo Willems is brilliant at writing text that engages children and that they can read fairly early. Try your library for these, but be prepared to wait - my library cannot keep these on the shelves!
Mice? You thought I said elephant books? Ah, these 7 mice all meet an elephant, but touch different parts of it and have limited ideas of what an elephant is like. Your children will understand the wisdom of seeing the whole picture as they read this lovely book.
The illustrations for this book are by Keith Baker (I recommended Big Fat Hen above), so you know I love them! This is a great concept book, showing the meaning of up, down, around, etc. It's a super short read with just one word on most pages, but it is stunning none-the-less. Look for the peanuts hidden on each page!
Look at all those "Ee"s hiding in the title! This classic begs for you to follow up by gluing colorful paper squares to make your own Elmer, and with at least 10 books about Elmer, your child can enjoy him for a long time!
That's 20 awesome picture books to enjoy for the letter E! Do you have a favorite that I missed? Let me know in the comments!
