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!

S is for Snowman! Day 4

Over the weekend we got a little bit of snow...but only the roads are still white...the grass is back to the lovely greenish brown color of fall.  Hoping for snow over break.  Since it will be the "first" snow, my boys will spend a lot of time in it!  Yes, kind of a selfish thought but really, we are ALL ready for a good snow!

So a couple of snowman activities to share today.

Candle Warmer Snowmen

Inspired by Teach Preschool-who did fall leaves with their candle warmer.

She made more than she wanted on her paper so we just sent the "extras" home.  I love that she put earmuffs on some, a scarf, crazy hats..a good variety.  Shows that her creativity is starting to develop.  At the beginning of the year she would have just used one color and one design on all of them. 

K. definitely enjoyed the melting process...and how much smaller and smooth the crayon became.  We will definitely do this again...maybe as more of a free exploration...with more colors but today we focused on snowmen as an intro to this type of activity. 

The first two steps:

Vowel Snowmen

Vowel Song

Tune: BINGO

The vowels of the alphabet

I know them all by name.

a-e-i-o-u

a-e-i-o-u

a-e-i-o-u

I know them all by name.

The vowels of the alphabet

I know their short sounds too!

/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/

/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/

/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/

I know their short sounds too!

You can find the Snowman Vowel Sort Worksheet at http://www.kellyskindergarten.com/Monthly%20Centers/January/JanuaryCenters.htm.  The link next to the image of the vowel sort snowflakes.  You'll notice that our "worksheet" doesn't look like the original.  :-)  I'm not a big worksheet fan and just doing the worksheet would not be enough practice for me so I cut the snowmen out, placed at the top of a large construction paper and used our alphabet miniatures to sort (using different objects than the pictures on the worksheet) and then had her sort and glue the pictures onto the snowman as a review.

Snowman Sewing Project

I don't know if I mentioned that we started a small sewing project.  I know I posted a picture on facebook.  This is K.'s first project that represents something.  We've done sewing explorations before but this time we are creating a simple snowman.  Obviously we aren't quite done yet...she has some buttons to sew on the belly and she wants a carrot nose then we'll decide how she wants the mouth and if she wants arms or not and other details.  Not sure if we are going to leave it as a banner or make it into a small pillow.  We are using felt as the felt shapes stick to the felt background and allows for a little easier time in sewing a shape to the background.  She's done a great job and my 8 year old son wants to start one...good winter break activity! 

bug/short vowel u

Monday our focus vowel was short u.  So, of course that leads right into the word bug and what child doesn't like to do things with bugs?  At least pretend ones anyway!  Some get a bit dramatic over real ones.  :-P  So, our journal was the simple one word topic of "bug".  (While the older ones were spending more time on their journal, the younger ones were doing calendar and a high-frequency word booklet).  Then we moved onto our story which was Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears by Verna Aardema.  We are having a real issue with this bug bugging us!  So it was a fitting story. If you haven't read it before it's an interesting book to read to the kiddos.  The ending is quite fitting.  :-)

www.amazon.com

We then transitioned into our /u/ cvc words, starting with b-u-g.  I've posted a picture of our moveable letter activity in the past.  We are still doing it the same way so I won't post another right now.  We'll be doing a review activity next week with the short vowel sounds.

Then of course it's time to move!  We got the parachute out again and put on some stretchy bugs.

Parachute is always a blast for the kids. You can purchase them in so many different sizes or you can simply use a light weight blanket.  So, they tried to keep the bugs on as long as they could.  These really went bouncing high...often on top of the piano and out into the kitchen and a time or two they hit the ceiling. There was a bit of squealing going on because of it but that just makes it more fun.  Then after they were all off the parachute, they kept their hands on and I showed a bug card which they named and then we shook the parachute while we said the name to find out how many syllables were in it.  Then the bugs were put back on and we continued on that way for a bit.

Then it's numeral formation time. 

They simply created a caterpillar and wrote the numbers backwards (their idea) from ten to 1 or 0. 

Then it was art time but I posted about that yesterday so won't say much about it now.

I also forgot about our letter formation B butterflies...and then we ran out of time so we'll do those tomorrow.  We did our Listen and Do activity (following verbal instructions) along with our scissors activity.

This activity was reproduced from Word Family Helpers a Mailbox publication.

And I decided that part of our fine motor component would be game playing.  I found that we just didn't have time for that during the school year and playing games is very beneficial as they are learning to work together to solve problems, follow rules, take turns, learn about good sportsmanship, (paying attention to whose turn it is so they didn't annoy those waiting), and it's good for fine motor skills, especially if there are cards involved.  Remember that flipping cards over is great for developing/strengthening muscles in the hand and wrist which is necessary for good penmanship.

Our game yesterday (and we played it again today :-))...

 

Need a gift for a preschool age child?  This is an excellent game.  It took longer to complete the game then I expected when I first saw it.  Today we averaged going through 3 stacks of the cards before completing a game but it's pretty fast moving. They played three games in a row!  "No reading necessary" though it does use words (good thing too!) it has symbols also to give the children clues.  My 8 year old still enjoyed playing the game with the younger ones and to be truthful...I kind of had fun too!  Some board games (like Candy Land) drive me bananas.  :-P This one didn't.  So it has that going for it!

For our phonological awareness activity we use a borrowed story set from our local Regional Resource Center.  All brand new since it's a new resource to our area.  They are beginning to provide infant-preschool materials for us to borrow.  It'll be interesting to see how it all works.  I've been wishing we had something like this in the area and so I'm a bit excited.  It's a good way to try something out before purchasing it yourself also.  So, one of the student's favorite book is There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly so we used the very nicely made set to work with sequencing and retelling a story.  I have some home made pictures for this story but the children loved (including Trent, now 2 years old) putting the animals inside of the woman. 

All made of thick felt and velcro.  Definitely something I'd consider purchasing.

All for now!  Tomorrow we are moving to the short o vowel and will do a bit with "pots".  :-P