Letter Of The Week - S

Had another great week with our letter. This week was S. Stupendous!
Day One: This week came around the time we were trying to plant our garden. But we had such a wet and rainy spring, we hadn't made it outside yet. On the upside, this gave me plenty of materials with which to decorate....Seeds!

The Turn-Around, Upside-Down Alphabet Book was this week's selection. It was adorable! Each page had a large letter on it, and you physically turned the book to all four directions to see what the letter would make. An arrow? An alligator's mouth? So fun.

Day Two: S is for Shapes

This is the first time I'd done a sound that uses a combination of letters. Yes, S is the first letter of 'shapes' but shapes doesn't start with an Ssss sound. I was okay with this little blip, since my son is really very strong on his sounds, and combinations are probably more appropriate for his level.

*We pulled out this classic Tupperware toy. Doesn't everyone have this? Didn't you all grow up with them?
*For a snack, I cut food into different shapes and we ate them. Cheese was a square, orange slices were circles, pretzel sticks were rectangles... it was fun

* We used our unit blocks. I love unit blocks. Seriously, if you don't have any, you've got to go out and get some for your child's next birthday. It is a classic for a reason. So, before we started to build with them, we looked at how we could combine some shapes to make others. Ie: Two triangles can make a square, etc.

* Then we played around and built some fun things together.

*We played our Cookie Monster Wii game. (There are some shape activities)

*We read Square Cat, Circle Dogs and Shapes, Shapes, Shapes

Day Three: S is for Sports

Back to a simple Ssss sound this time.

*We read Clifford's Sports Day and Just One Goal

*We played catch with our scoops toy (you can get this for $1)

*We played floor hockey

*We played with our little basketball hoop

Day Four: S is for Snakes

*We pulled out our Playdoh and made some slithery snakes!

*This was my rattlesnake.

*We played Snakes and Ladders

*We read Shel Silverstein's poem, "Boa Constrictor" as well as the story, Little Green Snake

*We played with our snake sock puppets

*We played Snake-and-mouse hide and seek.(The person who is it, is a snake. All the hiders are mice)

And that was it! Another fun week!

Quilt Patterns

During our Letter of the Week for Q, we had a Q is for Quilts day, and one of the activities we did was to create some little quilts for our dolls and animals. It was really great, and was a good learning activity.

We are lucky enough to have real, hand made quilts on all our beds, thanks to some very talented grandmothers and great grandmothers. And before we started making our quilts, we looked at them all and saw how they all had patterns. Some had patterns of shapes, some of colours, some of stitches, some had all three.

Then I brought out some felt shapes I had cut out from all different colours and then talked about how to make patterns of our own.
The kids set out their own patterns on their fabric and really came up with some creative ways to arrange their quilts.

They did patterns of alternating colours, or of shapes, or even of the way they had the same shape oriented.

Then, once they had gotten all their rows finished the way they wanted, I brought out the glue and they assembled their quilts.

After the glue had dried, they wrapped up their toys and tucked them in for a nap. Loved it.

Letter Of The Week - L

Letter L was Lots of Laughs!

Day One:

I had first thought of using lace to decorate. But it turns out I didn't have any, and to just buy lace for no reason is kind of pricey. But when I had gone to the bulk bins at my local grocery store and picked out a few lollipops to decorate our letter, it turned out that they are a VERY economical candy. I think I spent $0.63 for 10. Pretty good!

After we made our letter, we enjoyed one of our extra treats!

Since this was Easter week, I found two holiday alphabet books: ABC Easter Bunny, and An Easter Alphabet. I wouldn't say that either of them made me want to rush out to the bookstore, but it was still fun to have something special and different.

I added one more thing this day that we don't usually do on day one, but we watched a YouTube clip of a letter L song that I just love.

Day Two: L is for Lion

*We sang and chanted the 'Going on a Lion Hunt' song

*I found this great lion shapes page here.

*We made our hand print lion

*We listened to the music of The Lion King as we crafted

*We read two Aesop's fables: The Lion and the Mouse, and The Lion, the Donkey, and the Fox.

*We read the Mother Goose Rhyme: The Lion and the Unicorn

Day Two: L is for Lamb

*We made our marshmallowy Lamb Cupcakes

*We played with our lamb puppets

*We sang Mary Had A Little Lamb, (about 327 times!)

*We made this cute little heart-lamb craft
*We read Sleep, Baby, Sleep, and One Little Lamb

Day Four: L is for Lemons

I thought this day would be harder to fill than it turned out to be. Happy surprise.

*We made secret paintings and secret messages. To do this, pour about 1/4-1/2 a cup of lemon juice into a small bowl, and get a couple of Q-tips ready. Then using the Q-tip as a paint brush, and the lemon juice as paint, make your picture. Let it dry. It will be invisible.

To reveal your hidden pictures, you need to heat up your paper. I tried using a hair dryer, and didn't get anywhere with it. Then I tried my iron, and that worked really well. You can see my picture is appearing just from being beside it! It was pretty fun to watch a picture appear from no where.

*We made lemon-poppy seed muffins

*We played lemon bowling

*We handled, smelled and cut lemons. But I could not get my guy to try tasting one!

*We read Lemons Are Not Red, and The Red Lemon. (Funny how those books had such similar titles, isn't it?)

Kite Matching

Here is a quick game I whipped up when we had an unexpected late spring snow storm not too long ago that foiled my plan to go fly a kite that day.
First, I took several different colours of construction paper and cut lots of diamond shapes of various sizes. (To make the game more challenging, you could use all one colour.) Then I used markers to draw simple patterns and designs on the kite shapes to make sure that no two kites were identical.

Then I snipped them in half, shuffled them up, and set them out all over the table.

To play, we took turns trying to find a match and putting the kites back together again.

Shape Matching Snack

I have always liked Sociables crackers. They taste good, but for me the appeal has always been in all the shapes they come in. I think it is so fun. What other cracker provides that much variety?

Today I was fixing the kids a snack, and thought how fun it would be to have the cheese match the crackers. So I sliced the cheese and then trimmed the slices into shapes. When I put the plate on the table, my idea was pronounced, "cool." Victory, no?

As they ate, they put a cheese onto the matching cracker.

Then enjoyed the result of their matching game.

Quick. Easy. Fun.

Joy School - Shapes

Our shapes day was great. We have tried to have this day for the past two years, and funnily enough, each time that this lesson has been scheduled kids have been struck down by sickness and we have cancelled Joy School for the week. So we were very happy to have a day to finally have this unit.

Lesson Time: Our host started off her lesson with a brief review of geometric shapes, the number of sides each has, and their names. Then she taught how everything we see is made up of shapes. Shapes are everywhere!

To illustrate her point, she handed out blank white shapes to each child and they moved around the room and taped them to objects that matched, like this oval one child found on the frame of a mirror. We also found that light switch plates were square shaped, the clock face was a circle, the couch cushions were rectangles, etc.

Video Clip: Such a great idea. She showed a clip from Sesame Street, but instead of just having us watch it, she passed out wooded blocks of the shapes, and then when the two-headed monster drew a shape, the children had to find the block that matched and hold it up. They had such fun with this.

More Lesson: She passed out sheets that had three spaces for each shape. In the first two boxes, the kids practiced tracing the shapes on the dotted lines and then in the open area they tried to do it by themselves.

To see how well the kids could do identifying the shapes, and to turn it into a fun game, she had objects in a cloth bag that were all different shapes and the kids had to reach in and identify the shape of an object without looking at it.

My little boy was so excited to find he had correctly identified a circle with no peaking!

Craft Time: We made a shapes mobile. First we took two straws and crossed them in the center and stapled them in that position. Then the kids cut shapes from colored paper and we attached them to the straws with lengths of yarn. Perfect!

Snack Time: We ate sandwiches that were cut into triangles, and fruit snacks that were circles. Big hit.

Art Time: We each got a sheet that had different shapes of various sizes all over it, and we got to color them, cut them out, and make pictures with the shapes. (This was also very good to reinforce the idea that everything is made up of shapes)

Story Time: We read two books. One called 'A 3D Birthday Party' that showed the difference between flat shapes (circles) vs 3D shapes (spheres). Then there was this fun interactive book where we had a wheel to spin until we could find the matching shape of the one in the picture.

Singing Time: We sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and then the Hokey Pokey using the wooden blocks that we used in the video section. So we sang 'Put your triangle in, put your triangle out,' etc and they did the actions with the appropriate blocks.

Wiggle Time: She had two games ready to do. This one used adorable cards that had characters that were made of shapes. She scattered all the cards out, and the children had to find the ones that went together and build the characters by putting the cards together in the right order.

The last thing they got to play with was a shape-sorting toy, which was a good review to have at the end.