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!

TBT: Pom Pom Fun

Back when morning sickness was just starting to kick in I needed a way to keep Sharli busy for a while. I dug back in my blog archives and pulled out a few ideas that had worked really well with Erik when he was little. I needed something that was low prep and used materials I already had on hand, and here's what I came up with. 

An easy to assemble Pom Pom Tunnel...

...

 ...and a simple Pom Pom Toy.

These kept Sharli busy for quite a while, giving me a chance to do whatever I needed to do (which probably means I was laying on the couch concentrating on keeping my lunch down).

Maren

So I thought I ought to explain why I've been such a terrible blogger for a while now. For months now I've been operating in survival mode. I haven't felt well, and any time I had a spare moment that could have been used to blog in, I almost always chose to take a nap. Now, don't worry there wasn't anything seriously wrong with me, I was pregnant.
Now though, I no longer have that  problem. A few days before Christmas the newest member of our Playing to Learn crew arrived and (other than a severe lack of sleep) I am finally feeling like a human being again.I'd like to introduce you to Maren, our new little sweetie. She is a good baby (as if there was such a thing as a bad one) and her older siblings took to her right away.

 Life is slowly starting to settle in to a new normal and I'm hopeful that I'll be back into blogging again now on a fairly regular basis again.

An Eggy Experiment

For our letter E science activity I knew we had to do another experiment. And, why not throw some more E's in there and make it an egg experiment? I found some fun ideas on Science Sparks, and we decided to go for it. First we gathered our materials.

-Distilled Vinegar

- An Egg

- A glass container big enough to hold the egg

- A measuring cup (optional, I wanted Erik to be able to pour the vinegar without handing him the whole jug)

 Put the egg in the glass and cover it with vinegar. Leave it for several days (I think ours was 5-6 days) while you observe. 

The egg will get air bubbles on the shell when it starts reacting with the vinegar. For us this happened almost right away. We observed the bubbles both visually and by listening to the bubbles pop.

 While we haven't actually sat down and discussed all the steps in the Scientific Method, I still try to get Erik thinking by discussing what we're observing and making some hypotheses. We even get Daddy in on the guessing, just to make it more fun. We made up a chart showing what we thought would happen and taped it to the wall above our egg jar. Dad guessed the shell would go away and the egg would break. Mom guessed it would become see-through. Erik guessed that it would bounce and break.

 I didn't get any pictures of the end result, but it was really neat. The egg shell dissolves (we had to gently rub off the residue with our fingers) and the egg swells up inside the remaining membrane until it's noticeably bigger than it started out.
After making our observations about the end result, we decided to go a step further and go with another idea from Science Sparks. We carefully removed our egg from the vinegar and I let Erik drop it (gently) into the empty kitchen sink. His guess was right. We were able to bounce it a few times before it broke and ran down the drain.

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

Dance a Dot or a Dash

The idea for this activity came from my book, How to be your Child's First Teacher. We've gotten so many fun ideas from this book!

We started out by talking about how some sounds are more like dots. They are short, quick, sometimes even jerky. This is called Staccato. Other sounds are more like a line or dash. They are long and smooth. This is called Legato. You can try to make samples of these sounds (with your little one's participation of course) by using your voice (something like saying la la la vs. laaaaaaaa). If your kids are like mine they'll love making silly noises. You could even take turns making noises and having the other person decide if your noise was a dot or a dash. From there, ask them how to make dot-like movements with their bodies (jumping, clapping, etc), and dash-like movements (spinning, moving hands/arms through the air, etc).

Once you've got the idea down, the real fun starts. I found this video on you-tube that has some good, up-beat examples of staccato and legato music, but you could find your own if you'd prefer. Then, you get to have a dance party right there with your cute kiddos. Listen and decide if the music is playing "dots" or "dashes", then try to move your bodies accordingly. 

Erik is attempting to demonstrate a "dot" movement by jumping. 

Sharli wasn't so sure about all this craziness, but Erik had fun. Unfortunately it's hard to take pictures of moving/dancing children while you are also moving/dancing, so you'll just have to try this one out for yourself and see it in action.

Moving around the room in long smooth "dash" movements. 

*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 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.