Letter U, Under the Sea

We happened to have a convergence of oceany awesomness at our house, and oh boy did we have fun with it! Erik had to write  report on sharks for school during the same week that it was my turn to host our pre-school coop and teach the letter U. We decided to go whole hog with an ocean theme for everyone! 

Some of our letter U activities included making sea Urchins out of play dough and toothpicks. Some of the kids were enthralled with the simple fun of stabbing their ball of play dough with all the toothpicks, some weren't as interested. 

 Another fun thing we did was to make a giant Under the sea coloring page for all the kids to share. I taped a sheet of craft paper (the back side of some leftover wrapping paper would work too) to the table and just free handed some ocean creatures on to it. Don't look too close, I'm not an artist! :) The kids don't care though, and they loved it.

Set out a variety of coloring tools (crayons, markers, pencils, etc) and let them go to work. We actually kept this on the table for a couple of days for my kids to work on, putting a table cloth over it when needed to protect it.

 One really fun resource for our Under the Sea week was this great book! You can see some of the crafts we did out of it in the background of the pictures above. The kids really really loved it!

Click the image to go check out the book on Amazon.

*Diedre Mower is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. This post contains affiliate links.

Spelling Practice with Game Tiles

 I've been looking for fun ways to help Erik learn his spelling words, and while this one isn't super exciting, it's something out of the ordinary and that's good enough for me.
I pulled out our Banagrams game, but you could use Scrabble, or Boggle, or any other game that has letter tiles. I chose to use these ones because they don't have any numbers on them (like the Scrabble ones do) that might be distracting.

I sorted out a pile of all the letters that Erik would need and put the rest away. Then I gave him the pile and let him get started. I was really curious to see how he'd arrange them all on the table, and he's just like his mom. He wanted them all in a nice neat column. :)

 This activity was really great because it made him really have to think about which letter came next while he searched through the pile for it.
After he'd gotten them all spelled out on the table we went through all the words spelling them each out loud. He had fun and we made progress towards mastering his list, so it was great.

*Diedre Mower is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. This post contains affiliate links.

Egg Counting Mats

For our letter E math activity we made some cute counting mats that we found here. She has a free printable version of this for those of you who have a printer, or you can do like I did and just trace it onto a piece of paper. 

Erik had fun with this and it was a great addition to our box of activities that Erik can do on his own when I need him occupied for a while without my supervision. 

Letter E Elephant Craft

For our letter E craft we took our inspiration from Anna at The Measured Mom. She has a ton of great letter of the week material, I highly recommend her site!

I knew I wanted to use her idea of turning the letter E into an elephant, but I also wanted to play around with this painting method, so we combined the two. 

First, let's gather our supplies:

Paper

Paint

Easter Eggs

Scissors

Glue

I drew both an upper and a lower case letter E on some paper, as well as a trunk for our elephant. Then I set out the paint and some easter eggs for Erik to experiment with. 

 He was mildly interested in the stamping, but as always, it was only a matter of time until he switched over to finger painting. By the time he was done painting there were no traces of the stamping process left. Oh well.

 I cut out the pieces of our elephant and Erik helped glue them onto another sheet of paper. We came up with a sentence about our elephant, trying to incorporate as many e's as possible. We decided our elephant needed some easter eggs, so I drew some and Erik colored them. They got cut out and glued around our elephant.

 We added a couple of googly eyes (you could just cut some eyes out of paper if you prefer) and viola!

Letter E Activities

So we haven't (and are not going to) finished all the activities we had planned for the letter E, so this will be a mix of things we did do, and things that you might find interesting that I never got around to doing. Links either take you to a post about our experience or to somewhere else with fun ideas for the letter E. Links will go active as I get posts up over the next few days.

Language Development:

                Letter E books

Math Concepts:

                Measuring with an egg carton

                Count the Eggs              

Science:

                Dissolve and bounce an egg                   

Creative Arts:

                Elephant letter E craft/plasticegg printing

Letter D Books

We love trying to come up with books to supplement each letter theme. If you need help coming up with ideas for you to use here are some good places to look for letter themed books: The Measured Mom and Crystal and Co.
Some of our favorites this time around were:





The Dora the Explorer book would have gone nicely with our Doctor's Office imaginative play if I'd ever gotten that together like I had hoped to. Oh well.

*Diedre Mower is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. This post contains affiliate links.

Letter D Duck Craft

As I was planning our letter D theme, I saw this duck craft and knew it was the one for us! Erik has never been a big fan of coloring so instead we decided to paint our duck. We started out revisiting our Dot Painting technique from a day or two before, but Erik just wanted to dive in and the cotton swabs quickly fell by the wayside. 

After our letter D had dried, we cut it out and glued it onto a fresh sheet of paper. Great chance for some fine motor skills!

I gave Erik the duck's body parts (which I had cut out of construction paper), and he glued those on as well.

Last, but not least, the feathers! We found these at WalMart for cheap, and there are lots left to play with.

Finished!

We came up with a short description for his duck so we could incorporate some lower case D's into this, and then hung him on the well next to our other ABC animals.

Dot Painting, Exploring Pointillism

For our letter D art activity, we explored Pointillism, or Dot Painting as we called it. 

Let's gather our supplies:
Paint (we were out of store-bought paint, so we made some of our edible finger paint and it worked great)
Cotton Swabs
Paper (I traced clipart of things that started with D, as well as the letter D, but I also gave Erik some blank pages to explore with too.)

After demonstrating the idea of "dot" painting, I turned Erik loose with the paint and let him dot away. Or not, whatever suited him. He dotted for a while, but (as always) it was just a matter of time until this morphed into finger painting, and body painting, and just general mess making. 

 It was fun to talk about the sound the letter D makes while exploring a new art technique. This took some fine motor skill and hand/eye coordination, which makes it a great physical learning experience as well as a creative one.

Letter D Activities

Here's our lesson plan for learning with the letter D. We had lots of fun with this one, hope you do too!

Language Development:

                Letter D Books

Math Concepts:

                Deal a Story

Social Studies:

                People in our Community; Doctors
                      *So I never did make the Doctor's Coat and Stuffed Animal Bandages that I had planned for this one, but I wanted to share the ideas in case you want to give it a go. We also have this fun Dr's kit that Erik's Grandma gave him to round out our imaginative play. 

Science:

                Density Experiment

Health and Physical Development:

                Dance a Dot or a Dash

Creative Arts:

                Letter D Duck Craft

                Painting with Dots

Book list for Learning the Letter C

Here are some of the books we've been enjoying while learning about the letter C. Some of these came from the library, and some we pulled from our Book Nook. 

Erik's favorite by far has been "A Bad Case of Stripes", which came out of our own collection. I wasn't sure he'd enjoy this one, as it seemed a bit too advanced for him, but I was wrong. He loves it. It is the story of a young girl who tries so hard to be what everyone else wants/expects of her that she looses the ability to be herself. Only by doing something true to herself does she regain her true form. 

My favorite is probably "Clara Caterpillar", both for it's cute story and pictures, as well as for the incredible number of C's that are stuffed into the pages of this book. To quote the Amazon description: "A carefree cabbage caterpillar named Clara, who becomes a common cream-colored butterfly, can′t possibly compete with a catty, conceited caterpillar named Catisha, who becomes a captivating crimson-colored butterfly. Or can she?" Is that enough C's for you?

The Honorable Mentions go to: 

"Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?"; a fun collection from different illustrators showing why they each think the chicken crossed the road.

"The Carrot Seed"; Erik's favorite of the library books we checked out. It's a very simple story about a boy and his carrot. 

*Diedre Mower is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. This post contains affiliate links.

Chameleon Letter Craft

The other day Erik really wanted to paint, so we pulled out the water colors. I gave him a pile of blank papers to paint on, but he just kinda looked at them like he didn't know what to do with them. I started looking up coloring pages of his favorite movie characters on the internet and tracing them onto the papers for him to paint. Then, I realized this was a great way to add in something to do with our letter of the week. So, I grabbed the last paper and drew a large letter C on it.

 Surprisingly enough, he was just as excited to paint the C as he was to paint Mater and McQueen.

 After he was done painting, I realized we could use this as a base for our letter craft. So, using this idea as our base, we made a chameleon out of his colorful letter C. I think it's my favorite of all our letter crafts so far (you know, all 3 of them).

 Because Erik had never heard of or seen a chameleon, we got on youtube and watched a couple of fun little videos about them. We found this fun one of chameleons eating, and this one of them changing color. The really fun thing was an hour or two later when Erik was on the phone with his Grandma. He told her he'd made a picture of a chameleon, and Grandma (who had no idea how much, if any, time we'd spent actually learning about chameleons) started asking him questions about them. He was able to answer all her questions about chameleons without any help from me. It was fun to see how much he'd learned from such a simple activity.

Coffee Grounds Writing Practice

One of our neighbors came to our house a few weeks ago with a big box of food to see if we wanted any of it. The catch was all of it was past its expiration date. I dug through the box and found a few things that I thought would still be safe to consume or that could be re-purposed and let her do with the rest as she saw fit. Among other things we got some cans of sweetened condensed milk to make edible glossy paint to share with our play group friends and a few small bags of decaf coffee. 

I will admit that we are not coffee drinkers around here. I'm not aware of having ever had coffee to drink in my life, and I don't really care for the smell. So why would I keep the coffee? Well, there are all kinds of ideas going around online for ways to play with coffee grounds, such as "mud" play dough, home made fossils, worms and dirt sensory bins,  paint, and so much more. I thought we'd give some of them a shot, so I hung on to that old expired coffee. 

My plan was to start with some simple writing practice then move up to a sensory bin for both kids, then maybe some playdough. This was going to fill up several days worth of activity time, all with only using one material and a free (to us) one at that! 

For the writing practice, I just dumped a couple of packages of ground coffee onto a baking sheet and we had fun drawing designs and practicing writing the letter C. 

We played with this for probably about 10 minutes, but by that point I realized that unused ground coffee has a pretty dang strong aroma. And remember how I said I don't really care for that particular aroma? I was being nice. I REALLY don't like it. And apparently neither does Erik, he kept complaining about how stinky it was.
Finally, we gave up the attempt to get used to the smell. I emptied the remaining packets of coffee onto the tray and took it all outside to the garden. In a few months our veggie plants will thank us for the treat.
Now, I do have to say the really gritty feel of the coffee was a fun texture, and if we could have gotten past the smell we would have had a lot of fun with this one. If you happen to be one of the majority of our society who does enjoy coffee then I'd encourage you to give this one a try, either with unused ground coffee or the leftovers from the making of your morning cup (dry the grounds in the oven at the lowest possible temp).

Letter C Preschool Activities

We just finished the letter C, and we had a lot of fun with this one. I can't wait to show you all the things we did! So, without further ado, here is the lesson plan for our letter C week. The links will go active as the posts go up over the next week or two. Hope you have as much fun as we did!

Language Development:

                Letter C Books

                Write in coffee grounds

Math Concepts:

                How Many Caterpillars?

Social Studies:

                Community Clean-up

Science:

                Color mixing

                Carrot on a string

Health and Physical Development:

                Cutting C’s (fine motor)

Creative Arts:

                Chameleon Letter C Craft

A Book About Me

I found this fun idea for a social studies activity for preschoolers here, and thought that making our own book fit nicely with our letter B theme. I didn't take the time the day we made this to pull up my computer to look up the exact page ideas used in the link, but I think I like ours better anyways. 

So let's gather our materials:

-sturdy paper (we used construction paper)

-stickers, yarn, misc. embellishments

-crayons

-glue

-small dollar store photo album (or you could just use a stapler and staple your pages together)

I started by cutting out blank pages from a variety of colors of paper, though plain white would have worked as well. I used a marker to write the words on each page (and make simple drawings on a few, you'll see what I mean), then showed him how to complete the details on each page to make them personal to him. 

I feel like we're lacking in fine-motor skills, so this activity was also meant as a way to encourage some practice in that area. I tried to make it so that for each page we used a different skill/technique to make the page itself. I wrote words with dotted-line letters for Erik to trace...

...I had him cut out shapes from different colors of paper...

 ...I let him glue items to the different pages...

...some pages he got to color with crayons or colored pencils, most he decorated with stickers.  Here are some of our pages:

Other page ideas:

A page for each member of the family

The child's birthday

The child's pet

Favorite book, food, movie, toy, etc

Where you live

Hair color

Once you've made all the pages you want, stick them in a small photo album or staple them together. Enjoy reading your creation together!

 In the end we wound up with a book all about one of his favorite subjects, that he made with his own hands. It's fun to watch him pull it out and flip through the pages. He loves trying to remember what all the words are on the pages. I love that he got a glimpse into where books come from, as well as the assurance that he's important. So important there's a whole book about nothing but him.