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

Tips & Tricks Vol. 2

Have you seen those Life Hacks that are all over the internet? Well here are two Educator Hacks that we hope you can use.

Watercolor Trick

 We all know that painting with watercolors can be messy with the younger kiddos having trouble keeping their little cups of water upright and the water in the cup turns a yucky brown color. With this tip, those problems are a thing of the past!

 

I found this tip years ago in an issue of The Mailbox. All you need is a spray bottle filled with water and a paper towel for each painter. 

 Just give the tray of paints a few sprays and the kids are ready to paint. When the paints start to dry, you just spray them again and they are good to go! When the kids want to paint with another color, they  use their paper towel to clean their brush before painting with a different color and the colors stay much cleaner.

We promise if you try this just once, you will forever use a spray bottle for watercolors!

Writing Tip

 

Our wonderful Occupational Therapist gave us this tip. By using a small a crayon or pencil poked through the holes in a wiffle ball, small hands begin to get the proper arch that is needed to hold writing utensils correctly.

   

You may have to cut through one of the holes on one side in order to get the crayon started.

  


Once you have done that the crayon will slide right into the ball. It is super easy to change the crayon. One of our students even did it on his own!

Look at that great grasp!

We hope these tips & tricks help you all as much as they have helped us! If you try one of our tips & tricks and you have anything to add, please comment and let us know. 

-Angie and Heather

Construction Art

Our classroom is currently immersed in the middle of our construction unit. You saw from one of our blog posts a few weeks ago how we integrated this unit into our sensory table. Our students are still happily playing with the construction sensory bin and loving it!

Today we introduced a new activity in our art center that combines art, math and construction. The activity originally came from the Frog Street Pre-K curriculum, but we have tweaked it through trial and error to fit our classroom. The Frog Street activity called for students to create an AB pattern by stamping  different types of screws, Phillips head and flat head, into paint and then onto paper. I tried this last year using real screws as prescribed but found they were a little too small and it was difficult to see the difference in the screws.  I really liked the concept of the activity but needed a different type of screw to get the desired effect. We have a set of large plastic screws with different shaped heads in our classroom and decided to try those and see how they would work. They ended up working so well we decided to do the same activity with our class this year.

To do this activity in your classroom you will need manila paper cut in half to create long strips, plastic screws with differing heads and tempera paint. Each student gets to pick two screws they want to use to create their pattern, dip the heads into tempera paint and stamp them onto the paper, alternating each one to create an AB pattern. Here are a few pictures of the process:

The activity is super easy to recreate and each student really enjoyed creating their own pattern. My favorite aspect of the whole process is the opportunity to reinforce the concept of AB patterning in the art center. We hope you will try this activity in your classroom and share the results with us in the comments!

-Heather & Angie