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!

I Dream of an Elephant...

E is for Elephant

Have I mentioned that we go to the Library on Thursdays to pick up thematic books for the following week? Well, we do. We have a great, small-town library, and always find cute books and enjoy reading them all week long.

This week, for the letter E, I focused on fiction and non-fiction books about Elephants. The fiction books were cute, but by far our favorite was I Dream of an Elephant by Ami Rubinger. The subdued pastels are so beautiful, it made me want to frame these images and design a nursery around them! Kenna and I read this book about ten thousand times this week. Each page has a rhyme for a color, so it was the perfectchance for me to introduce kenna to rhyming. bShs still a little young, but this book was a nice and simple anf the rhymws were based on color words, with visual clues. awesome!

The non-fiction books we checked out were mostly used to look at pictures, since a lot of the info was way over kenna's head. It didn't stop my husband and I from learning a ton, though. Here's a few facts you should definately add to your list of "useless facts about elephants".

1. elephants walk on their tippy-toes.

2. Elephant skulls, with a large central "nose" hole, probably started the myths about Cyclops.

3. Elephants can only digest half of what they eat, so they eat ginormous quantities of food each year.

4.And the saddest fact I learned- elephants have no known predators except humans, and yet all species of elephants are endangered.

Kenna and I focused on elephant body parts- trunk, tusk, and ears, and them we talked about how their skin feels (texture), and what they might use their trunk for. She especially liked the images of elephants squirting themselves with water, and of the babies holding their mommy's tail with their trunks.

** my computer won't let me hyperlink at the moment. Elephant skull pic-

source is http://listoffigures.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/reconstruction-of-mythical-creatures/

E is for Elephant

Wheeeeeeee!!

We had a blast with the letter E this week. Kenna has an "E" in her name, so she knows the lowercase e really well. This made for a fun week. We did ELEPHANTS like crazy and I now know a TON of really cool/useless facts about the largest land animals in the world. :)

Red and black E Collage:

This was easy to set up and she really liked it. She can already identify lower-case e, so we worked more on upper-case E. I cut a bunch of different sized ones out of black construction paper, and left out a glue stick and a red piece of paper. After lunch, she wandered over to the table and got so excited! She spent a lot of time deciding where each E went, and hung it on her magnet wall as soon as she was done. I'm pretty proud that only one E was glued on completely backwards.

E Puzzle: Sorry for the sloppy game crafting- I should have made a nice pretty one for the photo, but honestly, I didn't have time! So here's what I did: I cut some foam to make the pieces of the E. Then I traced them, so it became a matching puzzle. (Make sure to make the top and bottom bars the exact same length, so as not to totally confuse and frustrate your toddler.) Simple, easy and a great "still waking up, don't talk to me, mommy" activity.


We started this project with some fun color mixing. I didn't have any gray paint (and with three kids, we just weren't rushing out to Hobby Lobby this morning...) so I decided to let Kenna mix some blue, green and white to see what we could come up with. We ended up with a really nice khaki green that actually suits our Elephant well! :)

I drew the Elephant with a sharpie and let her go to town with the paint and a nice soft brush. After it dried, I cut it out (with her guidance) and added some eyes. He is so easy and cute. After defending my "tusk" to my husband, I'll let you decide whether you can draw a better one, or just skip it.And yes, his ear is ugly- what can I say? Kenna was hurrying me!!