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!

In the vegetable garden this week...

 I recently discovered an awesome gardening book (fiction) for children, and had to get a copy for our class.  Two Old Potatoes and Me was written by John Coy (see it on his website here) and illustrated by Carolyn Fisher, and it is perfect for our farm theme.

I found some old potatoes growing in my pantry this morning planned ahead and let some potatoes sprout in the pantry, so we could observe them, read the book, and plant our spuds like the characters in the book.  We compared a sweet potato, a russet, and some sprouting baby yukon golds.  The children noticed a lot of similarities and differences between the potatoes, as well as discovering the eyes, and of course the growing sprouts and roots.

When we went outside a little while later, we put a layer of potting soil in a large tub...

 ... and started our own potatoes growing.  We'll add layers of soil as they grow, to hill up around them, and hopefully in a few months we'll have potatoes to eat!

 We won't have to wait that long for our green beans - they have sprouted!  We had a hard, soaking rain earlier this week, and the following day the beans began peeking through the soil.  The children are fascinated by the seed coat falling off,  and tiny leaves growing.

 We're observing them every day, watching their progress. 

This week our pumpkins - the ones that have sprouted from our old jack-o-lanterns (read previous posts about that here), have started to bloom. 

Unlike most flowers, squash blossoms are either male or female.  This is a male blossom, it has a single stamen in the center, female squash blossoms have a ring of five stigma, and a baby fruit growing from the base.  Once you see them side by side, you'll have no trouble differentiating!  The male flowers always start first, and are prolific.  These are the ones we eat!  We're careful to leave the female flowers, so they can bear fruit for us.  Want to know more about eating squash blossoms?  Here is a link.

See how many I picked on just this one day?  We have about a dozen flowers each day right now, and they are best in the early morning.  My friends come running to get a taste of them!

I tear off the petals, and discard the stamen and stem areas.  Squash blossoms remind me a little of the flavor of cucumbers - very mild, but slightly sweet.  Yummy!

There's one more fun thing we've been watching in the veggie garden this week - lots of ladybugs!  One of my kiddos is very into ladybugs, and knows that they eat aphids - and the children wanted me to show them what aphids look like.  When they asked a month ago, I hadn't seen any, but this week I found them swarming on our old cabbage plants that have gone to seed - we ate those blossoms too by the way!  Here's what these aphids look like - tiny little gray-green bugs.

 Now I understand why there are also ladybug pupa on the cabbage plants, as well as adult ladybugs!  I'm hoping to find some larvae and maybe some eggs too, so I can show the children the whole life cycle!

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day moms, and to all the other women in our lives who care for us in ways big and small.  

To celebrate our moms this year, I wanted a new project, something that our mommies would use, something more than a paper project or card to put away in a special box.  Those are treasured, of course, but I wanted... more.  

I settled on shrinky dink necklaces - a piece of your child's art to wear.  I cut and hole punched the plastic, bought jump rings and ribbon, and came up with a card to hold the finished necklaces.  In case anyone would like to copy the project, I took pictures of the blank cards and templates I used to create them.  It's hard to tell from this picture, but I cut the card stock along the shoulder lines, so the necklaces could be strung around the card like a real necklace.

 We talked about the color of our mommy's hair and eyes and skin, and the children got to work making the blank face look like their mommy.

 They wrote (or copied) sweet love words in their cards in their very best 3, 4, or 5 year old writing.

 Ta-da!  Here are our mommies, wearing their necklaces!  We love you moms!  Thank you for sharing your most precious children with us each day.

Have a very happy Mother's Day!

Farm, puddles, bugs, BRIT, and zoo!

We're continuing our farm theme this week and next, as there is just SO much we want to learn about.  I made this sorting game board for our plastic farm animals this week, and the kiddos sorted animals and seeds on it.

 We did a lot of piggy activities this week, including Piggie Pie! by Margi Palatini at the listening center, and the Wee Little Piggies memory game.

 This was an exciting game, especially when someone remembered all five piggies in order to make the "This little piggy went to market" song play all the way through!

 We also practiced planting seeds like farmers, putting in hundreds of beans, chard, beets and kale seeds this week.  There's still more to go, and we'll keep working on it.  One of our youtube.com videos this week was a time lapse video of beans growing, so we're hoping that by Monday our plants will be sprouting, and we can watch them grow in real time!  I'm also hoping we'll have lots of yummy fresh veggies to eat this summer, there really isn't anything quite like picking vegetables fresh off the plant and popping them in our mouths - yum!

This week we had two different field trips.  The first group of kiddos went to Bella's Storytime at the Botanic Research Institute of Texas.  I've mentioned this story time before - it's the best story time I've ever been to!  This month we listened to the story The Great Fuzz Frenzy by Janet Stevens (see it on Amazon here), and did lots of fuzzy activities.

 We counted fuzzy pompons, sorted items by how fuzzy they were, painted with fuzzy things, and made fuzzy creations, as well as dancing with fluffy balls of fuzz.  We love Bella's Storytime!

 Another group of kiddos went to the zoo to see the giant animatronic insects.  Most of them loved it, but one kiddo isn't in any of these photos, because he was hiding behind me each time.  There's nothing quite like a 20 foot tall moving tarantula to make some of us nervous!

  I wasn't really expecting these insects to be very educational, just an extra thing to see between other animal exhibits at the zoo.  I was wrong!  Seeing the insects so much larger than life allowed the children to see some of the adaptations that make them great hunters or flyers.  On the dragonfly we could see the spikes on it's legs, and how it held its legs in a basket shape for catching mosquitoes.  We like them helping us with mosquitoes!

 When the ladybug opened it's wings, we could see that the red parts are stiff wing covers, there to protect the flimsy brown flying wings below.  It's very hard to see that on a real ladybug, but we had plenty of time to check it out on these.

I planned to take one more group of kiddos to the zoo, but we had a very rainy day, and it was not good zoo weather.  Luckily, there was a break in the rain, and we were able to go puddle stomping.  The children were so excited!  We took our shoes and socks off, rolled up our pants, and ventured out with bare feet.

 The children stomped and splashed in puddles....

...found bugs and snails in the soil....

 ... and ran around and around the circle planter in our cul-de-sac.

 Walking barefoot in the rain and stomping in puddles is one of those things that I believe every child needs to do sometimes, but it's often hard to find the right time for it.  As adults, we're so often rushing from place to place or chore to chore, that these moments can slip right by us.  Today we really did stop to smell the roses... covered in rain drops.

 Here we all are, damp but happy.  Yes, we did need a lot of baby wipes and towels afterwards.  And yes, we will definitely be ready to do this again!

Here are a few more pictures of the fun and learning we enjoyed this week:  painting...

 ...cleaning the table with shaving cream after we finished painting...

 ... learning on the ipad - I love how focused these children are, and that they are helping each other.  It's great to see the children working together to help each other learn!

... playing outside - of course!...

 ...checking out the cool caterpillar I found (but can't identify)...

 ...looking for roly pollies and other critters...

 ...and enjoying a picnic in the backyard.