Showing posts with label jellybeans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jellybeans. Show all posts

Sunday, January 22, 2012

January language activities

I have so many stages of language development in my classroom that I'm trying to offer a broad spectrum of activities to grow skills.  I'm always on the hunt for fun review games that focus on letters or concepts that we've been discussing.    
Here are a few language activities we've done this month:

Review: Find the Inchworms (plus "Jellybeans" AND the Alphabet!)
I brought out our magnets and inchworms again and this time added our "jellybeans" (see this post) and magnetic alphabet pieces.  We had fun catching the objects with the magnetic wands and rummaging through the grass to find jellybeans: ) 
When it was time to clean up this center at the end of the week, I led my students in a group activity to sort the items.  We went around the circle catching inchworms, jelly beans, and alphabet letters and sorted them into the correct bowl.  After the items were sorted it was a cinch to put everything away in it's proper place.  (I love being sneaky with clean up!)

Alphabet Mittens:  
I believe the mitten pattern that I used is from a Mailbox book that I have.  (I made them a number of years ago).  To prepare, I hung the mittens in alphabet order from a string and clothespins.  For a group game I took off random mittens and passed them out to the students.  We sang through the alphabet and figured out which letters were missing.  The game was lots of fun when Miss Eileen got a little silly if a letter is not there ; )  I think we played this game at least four or five times -over the course of two weeks - and sang through the alphabet at least 20 times!

Shaving Cream Writing:  
For my younger students I tried using shaving cream to practice our letters.  Since this was an introduction to playing in shaving cream, it ended up being more about the experience than the writing.  Now that we've experienced it, I'm hoping next time I try this we can be a little more intentional about writing current letter we're focusing on or our names, etc.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

jaguar prints

"Trendy" is not me, but this project turned out looking like a piece of clothing you'd see hanging in the kids section at a department store.  That was not my intention - but unexpected outcomes are always welcome with a project!

Our animal friend for letter "J" was a jaguar.  Most of my students were already familiar with this animal thanks to pop tv (apparently Diego has a jaguar friend? - I'm not up on current kids shows...).  Anyway, for our large letter "J" I decided to do jaguar prints - jaguars have a specific rosette spot pattern on their body and I thought that might be a fun art element in our project.

I started with pre-cut "J" shapes, I would have preferred orange, but I had a whole stack of purple "J's"cut out from a previous year that I wanted to use up (I'm all about using what I have on hand - actually I'm a little neurotic about it...). 

To create the circular spot print I used the bottom of small plastic pop bottles, dipped in black paint. The bottles worked really well to create spots - and lots of spots quickly.  

We also added a jaguar face to our "J" (I found a jaguar mask printable on Google images) and glued on googly eyes.  They turned out great!

 Another "J" center:
"Jellybeans" - super simple and super popular with the kiddos.  
I placed a handful of colored floral rocks on a tray with sorting bowls and called them "jellybeans".  That's all!

We:
  • Sorted...
  • Counted...
  • Planted magic beans...
  • Shared (and fought over them- typically the fighting is first- ha!)...
  • Figured out which color had the most, which had the least...
  • Put the in the bowls and shook them around...
  • Made pictures out of them...