Nest Week/Spring activities

We started with E for Easter trays, which bled into Nest and Bunny trays, so the whole month was very spring themed! These were our trays dedicated to N for Nest.

 www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com has a great N for Nest week. We used this great letter match- I provided uppercase and lowercase letter tiles- matching capitals is too easy for them, so now they have to do the lowercase, too!

 Pattern block printable which they are loving. Next time I set out this activity, I will cut up the patterns into three strips. It was a little overwhelming with all three on one page. Plus, they kept trying to do work all three patterns at once, which meant blocks sliding around and them feeling frustrated.

Put the eggs in ABC order. We played a game where I laid out a-g and then pulled out two letters from the line, and they had to "fill in the blanks". This was soo good for mastering abc order!

 This sweet tray was for my 5year. She is very into writing prompts, so I found a "bird in nest" type picture from a book I LOVE (Bee &Bird) and she had to write a sentence to tell what is happening in the picture.

 Forming the letter N with playdough.

 Clip cards with eggs!

 I put out this tray again and got a little more interest this week. Someone matched up the 1 and the 2 and left it in a corner... :)

These crazily cute cards are color matching- too easy for my crew, but they LOVED it!

Easter "e" week 2014

We are officially doing FIAR now, so along with our E trays, we also rowed Reshenka's Eggs and did some beautiful artwork and a lapbook. Look for a separate post.

All of these trays were geared for my two and three year olds.


 I made a quick game by taking photos of a bunch of objects that start with E and printing it, and then burying the objects in rice. (I had originally buried them in "easter basket grass" but that was a disastrous mess, and the objects would not really "hide" and that was frustrating for my 2 yr, soooo we swapped it for rice.

 Easter goes nicely with butterflies, and this sweet little matching game was just their speed!

 I FINALLY made the popsicle shapes that I have been wanting to make forever. It took ten minutes once I sat down to do it. sigh.  (also, this is way more advanced than it appears at first- my kids reallllly struggled to make the shapes. After a whole week, they are finally catching on. We have never done an activity like this, and I am so glad I introduced it.)

 E is for elephants- great printable from COAH. My 3 still struggles with this skill, so we have some version of it on our trays every week.

 

 Some sparkly eggs and cute egg tongs made for a simple transferring activity. My 2yr chose this every.single.day.

 This went over much better than I anticipated. I thought that it would be way too difficult- but they totally got the idea of "small, med, large" and ran with it. I need to do more of this type of work!

 Number eggs. Put the correct number of lilies (foam beads) on the egg numbers. I only set out 1-5 eggs, because 1:1 correspondence goes out the window after 5 with my kids. I need to see more mastery of 1-5 before I move them up to bigger numbers.

 Using magnets to fill in E for Elephant.

 Egg tops match to egg bottoms in this fun game. (okay, fine. The kids did NOT think it was fun. The dots were kind of small and there was no control of error, so they just matched up all the halves and called it done.) oops.

 Cutting with easter stickers. Both of them are getting really good with scissors. Quinn likes to cut fast and furious- which makes everyone nervous! Chop, chop, chop!

 Bryce struggled with this puzzle for two days- it was required work and he cried and whined and did it wrong on purpose. Day three- he grabbed it off the shelf, plopped the pieces in place, and screamed, "I did it!" 

This was super-fun. I wrote the letters of their names on eggs- capital letters on one half, and lower case letters on the other half. (colored eggs provided control of error). Then, as a second step, they had to line up the eggs in the order of their name, using the cards I made. they liked this a lot.
E week sort of bled into nest week which bled into bunny week. It was a spring filled month of trays. I will put the rest of the trays in separate posts, but often they were on the shelves together!