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!

St. Patrick's Day Part 2 2012

Here are a few of the fun activities we did to go along with our St. Patrick's Day theme.

 I filled four green plastic eggs with these cool submersible LED lights. (Michaels for $7). 

 I turned off the lights and tossed them in the tub with the three amigos. :) They had so much fun!

 These egg-filled lights kept them busy for over an hour! They soon learned they could open the eggs and play with the lights, but they were so bright, I couldn't get a picture!

:Sensory:
 Rainbow Rice Texture tub. Contents- rice as a base. Gold coins, green eggs filled with LED lights, a rainbow wood piece, green shamrocks, and some scoops. I kept it simple at first, and we ended up making a boat for Kenna's Peg Einsteins to float around in.

 (cardboard boat with peg people is in Kenna's hand.) Quinn LOVED the texture of the rice.

 She's almost 9 months. She loved watching the rice run through her fingers. She loved squishing it around in the bin. She was completely enamored by this bin!  She also loved the glowing eggs.  She carried one around with her all morning!

 :Color Mixing:
The setup- coffee filters, eye droppers, and four colors of food coloring. I used about 5 drops of color, and then filled the rest of the way with water. This made a nice, watery color that ran beautifully on the cofee filter.

I also provided a misting bottle, which Kenna enjoyed immensely, to the point of soaking her filters into oblivion. Happiness is a squirty bottle!

 This was a different technique we tried- turn the filter over and let the color run down. It would have been pretty, but by this point, Kenna had mixed our colors to a murky brown. :)

 My attempt at a rainbow.

 Drying. We are a paperless household, so I used a dishrag to dry the filters- needless to say, some bleach will be in order if you do this to your towels.

 My rainbow shamrock!

They came out so pretty!! We are going to hang them in the window for the sunlight to stream through.

 :Cooking:
For our Social Studies connection, we have been studying Ireland. Kenna can now find Ireland on the map, identifies it as an island, and knows the colors of the flag! We baked some sugar cookies and used some almond glaze (Grammie's secret recipes) to decorate the flags.

 They really came out great, and tasty too! We also tried to make some freehand cookies in the shape of Ireland, but I'll spare you the gory result. :)

Lastly, we made some GREEN popcorn! (don't adjust your screen... I can't find the pic of our green popcorn, so I'll reshare our pic of pink popcorn from Valentine's day. LOL)

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

M is for Money

Santa got Kenna a cash register for Christmas. It's like this one, only I paid five bucks at consignment for it Santa made it. Also, it was missing all those fun accessory pieces pictured, but they appear to be in pounds or euros or something, so no loss! I made a new Dry Erase notebook using fun scrapbook paper and the laminator, and a hole punch. Then I tossed in some coins, some old credit cards, and some Bunny Money. It's awesome! I have some really fun number trays planned for this old cash register. Look for them soon! We are heading into a big unit on money, and it's going to be fun.

 Meet Bunny. Kenna's beloved friend. She's good at dancing, singing and snuggling.

What do we have here? Bunny Money!!!   I googled "money template insert face" or something like that, and found this fun free template. Five minutes in Microsoft Publisher, print, and a quick run through the laminator, and we have Bunny Money! This is going to be so much fun!

Meanwhile, here are our M trays for the week. Money, monkeys, and M&Ms (when Daddy wasn't looking!)

:Graphing, 1:1 correspondance:
 Count the M&Ms and put the corresponding number of pom poms on the bar graph.

Since Kenna is doing great with 1-5, I only made cards for 6-9.
Printables here. 

 :Prewriting:
Tracing a laminated M with a dry erase marker.  From COAH.

 :Sequencing:
Put the stinkin' adorable monkeys in order from big to small, or small to big. Use questions like "Which monkey is the smallest?" and "Which monkey is smaller than this monkey?"
Printable here at COAH

:Stamping:
lower case m. (We didn't get to it last week.)

:Spooning:
Using a spoon (or tongs, whatever she prefers) move the m&m candies to the silicone baking tin  (from Ikea). You could probably use opaque gems in place of candy, and I might switch to them once Kenna sneakily eats all 16 of these!  

:Sorting, Coins:
I provided a jar of 20 coins for Kenna to sort. (Darn you, nickels, you are so confusing!) After we sort out the coins, there are two sets of flash cards. One have coin value, and the other set has the coin names written in words. I  think we'll start with coin values, and then try to sound out initial sounds (p, n, d, and q) to find the right word to match the coins.  This is very advanced, but I'm kind of doing it as a "pretest" to see what exactly we need to break apart and work on.

 :CVC Ladders:
(consonant, vowel, consonant) We are using a metal tray and some magnet letters to start forming some small words. We've never done anything like this, and I'm excited to see how she likes it.
Printable here.

 :Patterns:

I love these patterns! I haven't decided whether we are going to use m&ms or just pom poms, but I know Kenna is going to love this. I actually printed two different patterns- one is on the back of this sheet. Awesome! Thanks, COAH!

:money, fine motor, shapes:
 This is part of a whole set of "do-a-dot" shapes that I foiund on kinderland.com.  I laminated a bunch of shapes, not really knowing what I wanted to do with them. Kenna doesn't need to practice shapes, so I was sort of saving them for Little Man. In the meantime, I realized that this mat is perfect for sorting coins. I provided a bowl of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. Kenna can fill the circle, make patterns with the coins, or try to put only quarters around the outside, and only pennies in the middle, etc.

:Coin Values:

Simple worksheet where Kenna will match coins to their values. She'll need help, but she'll love drawing the lines and erasing them.

Sand Art, Toddler style

 Kenna is 35 months. I bought a few fun little crafts in an Oriental Trading Coop, and while some were super easy and age appropriate, I have to admit, a couple are kinda over Kenna's ability level. 

 Take this lil beauty, for instance. Sand art! It looked really fun in the pictures, but the art board is smaller than a postcard, and the bits to color in are sooo small. The sand came in itty bitty packets, and while the colors were vibrant, there were a lot of them. (kinda overwhelming to Kenna, who wanted to use all of them immediately.)

I let her lead the activity, and she really wanted to "color in the lines" nicely with the sand, so I took over the glue. I put a bit of glue, and then she sprinkled with a spoon. Since she went a little crazy with the sand, it didn't take long for all 6 packets of sand to be a giant pile of brownish purple sand on our tray. She could care less. As a matter of fact, as soon as I set her free from the fiddlely little art board, she grabbed a big piece of construction paper and got to work.

She squirted glue, sprinkled sand, shook the paper, and then recollected the sand in a bowl. It was awesome to watch. :)  We have done this activity every day this week now. We moved to glitter when we ran out of sand. I've mailed off sand/glitter art to every relative I know, just to get it out of here!  I am impressed with how tidy she is being, and how controlled she is with the glue. She even made some shapes with the glue, and some letters. WOW!  As it was drying, she enjoyed feeling the texture and smooshing the drying glue puedles.

Excuse me,  I have to go out and buy more sand. Maybe I should just get brown, since we all know that's where it will end up after lots of mixing!  

Christmas Craftiness

We have been doing a lot of Christmas crafts around here. One a day, to be precise. Which means I should have 15 crafts to share with you by now. Sadly, I have far less than that.  My main excuse is that I have three kids under three, and my hands are too full to do a craft and operate a camera.

Here is some of what we have done! 8 out of 15 ain't bad, people!!

 Salt Dough Ornaments- posted about these HERE. (And technically, we did this over two days- one day of baking, one day of painting...so we are up to 9 crafts!)

 Raindeer Cinnamon Stick.  This is easy and takes some great fine-motor work. Curl a pipe cleaner for antlers. Glue on a tiny pompom nose and eyes. Thread a bell onto red ribbon or a bit of floral wire (or a bread twisty tie or even a pipe cleaner). Draw on a mouth.

 I love this picture- Kenna is trying to thread the bell onto floral wire, and our cat Waffles is patiently watching. I can't tell you how often he sits and does "learning" with Kenna. He's the sweetest cat.

 Classic Snowman Snow Measuring stick. Early morning paint a paint stirrer white(Free from hardware store). Once dry, glue on the details. We used stiff felt to cut out a hat (Kenna cut it herself!) She cut a carrot nose out of foam, and glued on two tiny eyes. I wanted to draw a mouth with a sharpie, but she asked me to cut a smile mouth out of stiff felt.  I used a small strip of fleece to make a scarf. The indent of the paint stirrer makes a perfect neck.

 When all the details were dried, we lined up the stick with a ruler, and ticked off each inch. Kenna helped count and identify numbers. She isn't quite sure what the stick is for yet... wait til it snows and we go and measure how deep it is! It'll be so exciting! (I ambitiously numbered our snowman measuring stick to 8 inches... LOL)

 Foam stocking with foamie decoative stickers

 Tape art. I wanted to do some tape relief- where we tape, paint, and then peel off the tape to see the pattern. Kenna was so absorbed in pulling off pieces of tape and placing them on the paper, I decided to skip the painting this time. I forgot how much fun tape could be! We have a few rolls of Shurtape- colored, not-so-sticky tape- from my days as a teacher. The company(local to us) had donated a gabillion colored rolls to the school, so each teacher has a lovely stash for crafts and things.

 Handprint Santas. I did this with Kenna, and need to take time to do it with the babies (I think I need Handy Husband to help though- babies and painted hands are a recipe for disaster!!) I painted Kenna's palm "peach" and her fingers red. She stamped a couple prints, and then when it dried I added the details. Ho Ho Ho! (or as Kenna says, Yo Ho Ho! Apparently Santa is part pirate.)

Our lovely Cone trees, as seen here...

And finally, some more foam art, which I have to admit, she loves. Kenna loves stickers. It's so easy, and she loves it. That makes me happy.
If I find pictures of more Christmas Craftiness, I promise I'll add them here. There are sure to be at least 5 more crafts lurking around... Oh, I also promise to try really hard to remember to take pictures of the crafts we do each day for the rest of the month.