Easter Hoppenings Pt. 3: The Hunt Is On!

The hunt was on yesterday as all our little bunnies headed outside for an EGGciting egg hunt!

Each child wore the bunny ears they made earlier in the week while they searched for eggs. The ears were festive and made for some cute pictures! Over the past few weeks we asked parents to send in empty egg cartons and used these in lieu of baskets for students to collect eggs. The use of the egg cartons ensured each child was limited to 12 eggs and made for easy monitoring during the hunt. We did have one carton that had 18 available spots. In this case I used a sharpie to draw an X in each of the extra spots and instructed the child not to put any eggs in those spots which worked well.

The students had a blast as they had been anticipating this day all week long! Here are some pictures of all the fun:

Happy Easter from us to you!

-Heather & Angie

Easter Hoppenings Part 1: It's A Great Hare Day!

   We are hopping toward Easter in our class!

Since Easter is this Sunday, we are doing all things bunny in our classroom. Today we started making bunny ears. These will be what the kiddos wear on Friday when they hunt their eggs. The kids love these! We love these!
The bunny ears are super easy to make. You will need:

• white card stock or white stiff construction paper
• pink construction paper
• sentence strips
• stapler
• glue stick
• stickers

To make things easier, we pre-cut the outer white part and the inner pink part of the ears. One thing to remember when cutting the ears, make sure that you have a right ear and a left ear! They just look better that way.
Give each kiddo a set of white and a set of pink ears. Have them glue the pink to the center of the white on each ear. Once they do this we staple each ear to the sentence strip in the front. We have tried letting the kids glue the ears onto the sentence strip, but the glue doesn't keep the ears upright and we have lost an ear or two. It makes for a sad bunny when an ear is lost :(



After the ears are securely on the sentence strip,   the kids decorate the strip with their stickers. Super simple, super cute!

 
 Be on the lookout, we will be posting another fun Easter activity in a day or two!

-Angie & Heather

Sensory EGGStravaganza!

Easter is just around the corner, and if your students are anything like ours they are certainly hopping with excitement! We put our heads together and came up with a fun Easter themed sensory bin for our students to enjoy this time of year.

I found a capital/lowercase letter matching game using Easter eggs on Pinterest. All you need is 26 plastic Easter eggs in varying colors and a sharpie. On the top part of the egg we wrote the lowercase letter and on the bottom we wrote the capital letter.

Here is the original pin:

We tried to make sure letters that look similar were not written on the same color egg as to help students differentiate between the two. Once the eggs were finished we separated them and placed them in our sensory table with lots and lots of Easter grass. Angie has used Easter grass in her sensory table for many years and the students always love it.

Our students are having a lot of fun exploring the texture of the Easter grass while practicing their literacy skills by matching the letters on the eggs. This sensory bin is inexpensive, easy to clean, and easy to create.  

We hope you will try this in your classroom and let us know the results!

-Heather & Angie

Hearts, Hearts, Everywhere!

Valentine's Day Activities

We saw a lot of cute Valentine crafts and activities on some of our favorite blogs and  Pinterest this year. So many in fact,  that it was hard to choose what we would do with our class. We knew that the kids would do some sort of craft as a present for their parents and I had seen an adorable card on Facebook that I really wanted to do with the kids. Heather and I found a cute name puzzle that we thought would be great for a small group literacy lesson. Heather had a great idea for the home center. 

I Love You To Pieces

This great card came from the blog called I Can Teach Teach My Child. 

                                                      

http://www.icanteachmychild.com/love-pieces-valentines/

The only change we made from the original blogger was for the stained glass effect. She had used clear contact paper and we loved the look, but we didn't have any contact paper, so we used snack size baggies instead. We are all about using what we have on hand and if we have to purchase something, we try to do it on the cheap! 

Here are the materials and steps we took to make these cute cards:

We had the kids tear small pieces of red, pink and purple construction paper from our cutting center to add to the baggies. 


Next we added a few drops inside the baggie and sealed it shut. Then the kids used their 
fingers to spread the glue inside the baggie. 

Then the kiddos put their torn scraps into the baggie and sealed it shut. They like this part!

After the kids chose what color they wanted for their card, they folded the card hamburger style and the adults cut a heart through both sides of the card. 

 Then they taped (with a little help) the baggie inside the heart and glued the two sides together.

 

 We think the end result is adorable!

Some of your students are able to copy and write their own words. We also have some who are still on a tracing level, so we used a highlighter and wrote the words for them to trace. 

 We think the parents will LOVE them!

The heart name puzzles we made came from a pin we found on Pinterest.

  

 http://www.howweelearn.com/preschool-valentines-day-craft/

 We loved how this activity incorporated literacy, fine motor and spatial awareness. 

We let the kids pick chose what color they wanted for their heart and then we folded the construction paper hamburger style and then traced a heart from a template we made. We made an executive decision to cut out the hearts ourselves before we did the small group. We drew the jigsaw lines on the hearts before we gave them to the kiddos. We tried to only have one letter per jigsaw piece, but some of the kids have SUPER long names, so some kids had two letters per piece. Those who could, wrote their own names and then we used a highlighter for the kids who needed to trace their names. 

         

 

Some of the kiddos needed hand over hand help to cut their puzzle and others zoomed right through. 

 

 They then put their name puzzles back together and then they glued them to a piece  of copy paper. 

Aren't they cute!

 The last thing we did this week was adding Valentine party plates and cups to the home center. Heather just got the plates and cups from the Dollar Tree. Who knew that the kids would love something so simple? They had a blast having Valentine's Day parties every day!

They set the table all on their own! 

                     

We had a lot of fun with our Valentine activities and we hope you enjoyed the post. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know! 

-Angie and Heather

On The Move!

We just started a new theme on things that move, including transportation, travel, locations, and more. Through a few Pinterest searches we found some fun ways to integrate this theme into our centers.

In our art center the students got to create geometric trucks using die cut shapes. The idea came from this pin:

 

The trucks were very easy to make and the students had a lot of fun choosing shapes and putting them together to create a unique truck. We began by die cutting a few different shapes including squares, circles, and rectangles all in various sizes and colors. Then the students chose the shapes they wanted to use and glued them on a sheet of manila paper to create a truck. 

The results are as cute and unique as each student!

We love to change out our sensory table as often as possible and found a fun transportation themed sensory bin on Pinterest. We used dry black beans, yellow straws cut into small pieces, Hot Wheels type cars, toilet paper tubes stuffed with a paper towel, and red, yellow, and green pom-poms. We arranged the straws to look like the stripes on a road and created a few different lanes. Each lane is equipped with a stoplight using a toilet paper tube stuffed with a paper towel and one set of red, yellow, and green pom-poms. The students can choose what color the stoplight should be and put that color pom-pom in the toilet paper tube.

Here is the original pin:

Here is our variation:

This sensory bin has been a hit! We will definitely be using this again in our classroom.

Through a few Pinterest searches we also landed on an idea to incorporate transportation with our light table. Angie used lamination film and sharpies to create railroad tracks, a river, roads, and a runway. Through trial and error we discovered that silver sharpie did not show up. 

Original Pin:

 

Our Variation:

These were placed on the light table along with small light table vehicles we have and the kids went to town with them!

 

We hope these ideas provide some inspiration for you to get creative with transportation in your classroom. If you try any of these ideas or have a few of your own please share them with us. We would love to hear from you!

Heather & Angie