Froggy, froggy, green and brown...

Another post with some accumulated activities we did with the frog theme. 

The title of the post is from the song Frogs in School by Julie Austin and it's a favorite around here.  It's on her Fandagumbo CD.  You can find the lyrics at http://julieaustin.com/frogs-in-the-school. 

Bubble Wrap Sensory

Bubble wrap is used quite frequently around here.  They love it and so do I.  I can sit and pop those bubbles and I will definitely have a bit of bubble wrap around for my school-agers next year.  One activity we love and have done multiple times is dish soap and paint on bubble wrap.  This makes some cool prints.  I chose to use just blues and greens this time to make a "pond" to go with the 5 Green and Speckled Frogs song and manipulatives so we can keep the foam here for other uses. 

Froggy Sensory With Hair Gel

During our bug week they really enjoyed finding the bugs in a different spot/to be used with different materials each day so I've done the same with our frogs.  In this picture I put them with hair gel and mancala beads.

Frog and Flies Addition

The Mailbox Preschool/Kindergarten Magazines have centerfold games that can be laminated and used.  This is one of them.  Each child rolled a dice and placed that any flies on the mat.  Very simple addition...great for 3's and 4's!

Sight Word Booklet

These are nice little sight word booklets.  With H. here were found the word "see" on every page.  With K., she was able to read it all on her own.  This booklet is one of several printable booklets from the Mailbox Publication High Frequency Word Booklets.

Bulletin Board Strips

Did another more "formal" activity with our frog bulletin board strips.  This time we played an I Spy where the children guess the number I was thinking about.  I used number formation phrases such as "curve around and slide to the right".  I also chose a number and covered up the number before and the number afterward and the children took turns telling me what those numbers word.  Simple, beneficial!

Frogs on Logs 

Another Mailbox publication activity.  I used their estimation sheet but chose to make logs out of simple construction paper and use our frog manipulatives.  They suggested using green pom poms.  Something similar can easily be made on your own.  I love that picture on the left.  Her estimation was the same as the actual measurement and she let out a huge "whoop!"  LOL  

Frog on a Log Vowels

(Picture isn't grand, sorry!  Sent home both children's work before noticing that none of the quick snapshots turned out.)

Initially I planned to have them use these order by size frogs from to match frog rhyming pictures but chose at the last minute to reinforce those short vowel sounds.  For the toddler I simply used numbers and number dots but focused putting the frogs on the log from biggest to smallest, which he did without a problem.  :-)

Shades of Green Froggies

All the children had such a look of concentration when they were doing this activity.  :-)

This was right up the alley for T. and his sense of order.  :-)

The end product wasn't what I'd call beautiful but the process was great and they did enjoy it.  My goal was to have a project that would dry and go home the same day since it was the last day of school.  If I just let them have free for all with the sponge applicators like I would normally do, they wouldn't dry before noon.  :-)

It incorporated art (shades of color-mix with the children), fine motor and eye-hand coordination activity. 

Lily Pad Number Word Match
www.makinglearningfun.com

This was a great way to see which number words K. actually recognized.  Though I made two "trays", one with larger numbers and one with smaller numbers, only K. really knows a good portion of number words, as she's a bit older so I was watching for decoding practices for H. but K. actually sounded the words out for him.  Simple, easy, and they seemed to enjoy this, especially after T. gave them a frog after they completed each lily pad.  :-)  Metal trays from a dollar store and magnets on the back of the flowers.

Watch Me Grow: Frog

 This is a lovely book! Very informative, great illustrations! Better yet, the frogs I purchased from Dollar Tree matched closely to the frogs in the book!

Also want to remind you to check out the following sites for frog themed activities.  We've done several from them that I didn't post about.

* Frog Frolics Activity Kit from Homeschool Share

(The word find from this kit.  This is one way we complete word finds.  :-)  Colored chips vs. dry-erase markers)

* Frog themed activities from Making Learning Fun

(I had only printed the background frog for the toddler to match the pieces but I ended up going back and printing the background for the other two as well, this puzzle was harder than we thought it was going to be!)

* Frog themed activities from Kidssoup (membership fee required...well worth it!)

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Non-themed activity:  these last few days I've been asking for suggestions of activities they would like to do again.  This was one of the suggestions they gave me.  :-)

And a lovely gift from one of my families!

I is for igloo

I decided to read Jan Brett's The Three Snow Bears today to go along with our I is for igloo theme.  Cute book, I love the illustrations best.  The endings of these retakes of the story Goldilocks and the Three Bears tend to leave me hanging a bit.  I don't always agree with how they end.  :-)  Still a worthwhile read!

I simply scanned images from the book that went along to create a retelling activity.

Long I-Short I

A very simple activity to create.  :-) 

I folded two pieces of l2x18 white construction paper in half (together), cut the basic igloo shape, cut the top layer on the fold to make "doors", stapled the two igloos together, and added the few details there were.  K. cut out the Long I-Short I pictures.  She glued the labels in the igloo and then glued the pictures on the correct side of the igloo.  The short /i/ sound is a bit difficult for her to remember yet.  She gets it confused with short /e/, understandably.  So we've been doing quite a bit with short vowel sounds the last little while.  The Long and Short Vowel sort pages can be found at http://firstgradealacarte.blogspot.com/2011/11/e-i-o-u-sorts.html

Measuring Igloos

We've done quite a bit with nonstandard measurement and using a ruler such as this (Print Shop) helps the children to transition from nonstardard measurement to "real" measuring with a rule.  After estimating how many penguins wide each igloo was, she measured with the ruler and seriated.  Then she was welcome to take the ruler around to measure other things she could find.  (If I hadn't created this activity BEFORE I had decided what book I was doing...I would have used polar bears instead of penguins.  :-p)

Cool Colors Painting

A nice open ended art activity-painting on aluminum foil.  I cover a piece of cardboard (cereal box cardboard works great) with aluminum foil and tape at the back.  When we paint on aluminum foil, I add dishsoap...this helps the paint stick to the foil and not flake quite as much.  Also gives it a shiny, smooth look, at least while they are painting with it.  :-) 

We've been talking a bit about seasons the last few weeks and so we started this activity reminding ourselves what a color wheel looks like.  (There are many different types of color wheels.  I like to use the simple six color color wheel with preschoolers.)  I cut the wheel in half, in front of the children, keeping one half warm colors and one half cool colors.  Then we talked about what each half reminded us of.  Summer colors or winter colors.  Worked perfectly!  Led right into the discussion of the warm and cool colors and how where there are igloos it's "winter-y" feeling out...cold...cool.  So I provided the cool colors- blue, green, and purple- for them to paint with.  Just to encourage noticing detail and conversation I gave K. a small, medium and large paintbrush.  :-)  She loved that little one!

Sugar Cube Exploration

Decided to have my husband pick up sugar cubes for this week as it is similar to blocks of ice/snow that would have been used for igloos.  They built with them for a bit.

Then I gave them colored water and eye droppers.  :-)  K. kept telling me, "It's going down!"  "It's timbering!" (My personal favorite.), "Oh, Ms. Amber...remember when we did D is for Dissolve?"  BINGO! 

Will let these be all for now.  Will share what we did with our I vocab cards in another blog.  Hope you have a lovely week! 

S is for Snowmen! Day 2

No snow yet...actually the forecast is rain!  :-(  Oh well.  39 degrees out today when we went outdoors.   We're having fun with our snowmen days!  Here's a few more activities we did with the focus of snow and snowmen.

Snowflake Snowman

Children explored with painting a piece of paper with watercolor/salt mixture.  They also explored with cutting paper snowflakes.  :-)  They made at least one large, medium, and small snowflake to create a snowman on their watercolor background. 

Especially fun to watch them open that first snowflake they made!

Salt Snow

Children love to use eyedroppers so after exploring with salt a bit I provided some watercolors and eyedroppers.  I've done this before with liquid watercolor.  This time I used what I had on hand...and that was the watercolor "spray" bottles that make such a mess!  LOL  My hands were covered with watercolor just preparing the bowls!  Oh well!  The children enjoyed the process and yes, they have slightly stained hands...but I thank my families because they understand that the process of an activity is so much important than the outcome and whether or not their child got dirty or not.  :-)  I try to minimize stains but they do happen, especially with this particular brand of watercolors! 

Snowman Seriation/Measurement

Just simply created my own snowman seriation set in Print Shop awhile back.  Children order by size then use the linking cubes to explore with nonstandard measurement.  Also, I incorporated the concept of estimation or "guesstimation" with this activity.  In the first grade classroom I was in they were doing estimation and one thing I noticed was that this was difficult for the children to do.  Obviously they had very little experience with it.  Most had a really hard time logically thinking about what would be larger (they were working with addition/subtraction facts) and what would be smaller.  There were also some that had a difficult time "letting go" and guessing and understanding that it was okay for them to have the incorrect guess.  So I told myself that I was definitely going to be doing more "guesstimation" activities here with my kiddos.  So we did today.  Do you think you will have more or less cubes than the green snowman?  Encouraged a guess with each snowman and let them know that whatever they "guessed" was a-okay mainly by just being matter of fact and stating..."Okay...let's fnd out how close we were!" 

Snowman Alphabet

http://www.makinglearningfun.com/

Children chose a hat, stated the letter, found the picture to put it on.  The only representation I didn't care for was that they used "earth" for the letter E.  Hmmm.  So I did that one for them but they did the rest.  :-)

Oh!  I did want to share the book we read today.  Repetitive, which allows for more interaction.  Humorous in a very simple way!  Might want to check it out...was so fitting for us this week because we have some "sneezy" issues going on with this cold going around.

Sneezy the Snowman by Maureen Wright

All for now...maybe I'll take the time to look at some other blogs today and see what others are up to this week!

L is for...

L is for Lizard!   

http://www.amazon.com/

A nice book that I've mention this past summer I think, is called Lizard's Song by George Shannon.  The summer kiddos as well as the ones today can be heard humming "Zoli, zoli, zoli...".  One daily activity we do is a journal in response to the book we read. 

Eventually the children will begin writing their own responses.  At this point in the year I start out with a fill in the blank sentence related to the book and they answer it, I write their answer, and they draw the picture.  Sometimes the answers are the same, like today, but other times they are quite different.  After we accumulate a few journal pages I'll bind them together and send them home.  Each journal page will have the book and author at the bottom so I'm hoping the parents will read this book with their child.  Children are so excited when we read a book they are familiar with at home and vice versa.  And repetitive readings of a book has so much value!

We also started into our focus letter.  Last week we worked with Mat Man and discussing sticks, curves, horizontal/vertical/diagonal lines and this week we used some of our Handwriting Without Tears tools to create the letter L. 

Sticks and Curves Set with Captial Letter Cards

(I really did not get very good pictures at all this morning so I'll use their thumbnails from www.hwtears.com.

We first used the capital L card to talk about whether we use sticks, curves, or both to make the letter.  Then they created the letter L with their own sticks in front of them.

Stamp and See Screen

Now picture it with the letter L.  :-P  We used the magnet sticks to create the L, then we used the magnet to trace over L.  This tool is going to get a lot of use I think. 

Roll a Dough Letters

Again, imagine a L and a lizard in the upper right hand corner.

I love that all of their items have the smiley face at the top left hand corner.  I used to use green smiley stickers and then moved to green dots long before I know about Handwriting Without Tears.  It's just a great way to create a visual of where to start when writing.

Slate Boards

Children used a small sponge chunk to write the letter L, then traced over with a chalk piece, then erased with the sponge again...all whiles saying L says /l/.  This repetition really pays off! 

We also did some Math Explorations with lizards.  My goal today was to see what they remembered from last year.  So I set some items out and said, "See what you can do here at this desk".  

Concepts that we introduced last year that I was looking for...

* creating a more/less set using the symbol correctly. 

* oral counting and counting with meaning.

* 1:1 correspondence with counting as well as placing one lizard on one branch

* if they remembered what a plus, minus, equal sign meant

* if they could sort by one characteristic and also verbalize their sorting technique.

* patterning-though this is a little more difficult to get with a set of so many different colors.  This works best when you provide just 2 colors.  We did a little patterning last week during journal time so I saw where they were at and so I wasn't watching as closely for this skill.

* measurement language

L is for  Longer.

This past Mailbox Preschool Publication had a simple "Longer/Shorter" book that fit very well into our morning this morning since we were talking a bit measuring with the lizards.  We used this as our scissors activity. 

No time to share everything so will let this be all until tomorrow. 

Have a lovely week!