X is for Xylophone

At the beginning of the week, the children made the letter X by cutting out and pasting the X puzzles from education.com. Download it for free here.

At the end of the week, we made colorful xylophones with paper. I cut out strips of colored paper and the children assembled the xylophones themselves. It was good practice in ordering by length. They then took the thin brown strips of paper and cut out circles to make mallets. They then placed the mallets as they wished. They all came out really well :)

W is for Watermelon

To make watermelons, I cut a circular sponge in half. I showed the children how to make the red half-circle and then they could use paint brushes, Q-tips, or their fingers to make the green rind. They used pinkie fingers to make the black seeds in the watermelons.

It was funny to see that many children felt compelled to create whole circles for their melons.

U is for Underwear!

This is always a fun topic. Underwear :)

I printed out some underwear and undershirts clipart, and the children simply glued these onto the letter Uu templates, which I have printed from this site.

This was great cutting practice. Some children even tried making patterns or such things. They can also color the underwear before gluing. 

Catching Up Again!

Well, here I am again after two months! Oops. I am going to try to organize all of the letter art pictures I have so that each letter is posted here. Also, I will add a few other interesting things we've done.

Everyone in the US seems to be enjoying summer holidays, but we still have three more weeks of school! I'm going to start getting sentimental about leaving preschool. Next year I will have 2nd grade, though, and I am very excited! Anyone have some recommendations of good 2nd grade blogs or web sites?

Earth Day Sale!!

Just a quick note. I am throwing an Earth Day Sale! All of my products at TPT are 20% off from now through Wednesday, April 24.

I now realize I should try to create some products for Earth Day! I feel like caring for the Earth is one of the most important things we should teach to children. The Earth's resources are precious, and I feel that teachers often concentrate on Recycling, which should be the last resort. Please teach your children to REDUCE first and foremost.

I love this image from The Story of Stuff:

Happy Earth Day!!

My TPT Sale

Amazon River/Jungle Clipart

I made this clipart when requested by another teacher at TeacherspayTeachers. Check it out!

It's on sale until April 30th. Check it out here!

100 Days of School!

As we approached our 100th day of school in February, children brought in 100 items to show the class. It takes a lot of time for the class to count out 100 items, so we had a few children bring in items each day to space it out.

 100 magnets

 100 pages in a book

 100 paper clips

 100 writing utensils

100 shells

Letters R, S, T, U, and V - Art!

We made red rectangles for letter Rr! I had a couple of different sponges and a rectangular container for printing rectangle shapes. A few of the kids got a bit carried away and ended up with a whole red paper - but hey, it's still a rectangle, right? For me, the experimenting is the most important part of these activities. Oh, and a bit of alphabet reinforcement :)

For the letter Ss, we used string and did some string painting. As I often do, I let the children pick the paint colors. I liked their choices :)

For the letter Tt, we first cut out the Tt templates (from dltk.com) and glued them onto colored paper. Then, I let the children use our box of colored paper scraps and cut out their own triangles to decorate the T's. Most children chose to decorate one "T" with paper triangles and drew their own triangles on the lowercase "t." That was something they started on their own and became a trend. I love it!

Later in the week, we did our alphabet art with tea bags! The end result is not so amazing, but it was a fun texture activity for the kids. We also smelled the tea bags. Yum!

Our beginning-of-the-week activity for Letter Uu was Underwear! Don't worry, I just made photocopies of underwear and undershirt clipart. The children cut out the underwear and glued it onto the letter Uu templates. Unfortunately, I didn't get pictures!

At the end of the week, the children made underwater pictures. We talked about the different things we can find underwater. The children drew with pastels and then painted over with blue watercolor. This is the only picture I have of that activity. I might be able to put some more on later.

For the letter Vv, I got the idea to do violets from this web site. I cut a sponge into two letter "v" shapes. The children could sponge paint V's onto their papers in purple and/or yellow. They then made violets with their thumbs and fingers. 

Catching Up

Well, to catch up, that whole week of school in February, the school was nearly empty. I had almost no kids, AND I wasn't feeling too well myself. I was able to stay home that Friday. Anyway, it was great that we put the kids from three different classes together, and each teaching team (teacher/assistant) had time to organize and clean their classrooms. It was great! Then we had our February holiday. And I got out of my blogging habit (partly due to camera issues).

Well, now we are back from our 2-week Easter break and I am finally catching up! I hope you find something useful here!

Reflections on a Strange Day

Well, yesterday I was home in bed with a fever all day. I am often slightly ill due to my chronic sinusitis problems, but I am rarely so ill that I lack an appetite or have an actual fever! However, I went to bed at 8pm last night and got a good 10.5 hours of sleep. I wasn't tip top at school today, but guess what? Over half of the ENTIRE student body was home sick! That's from all classes, aged 2 to 9. My assistant was also sick, but between my class and the other 4-5 year old classroom, we had just nine kids. It was great working together, and in the afternoon my colleague's assistant led the class, so she and I actually got time to collaborate on upcoming activities. I love to work with her, but we don't have any time scheduled in our day to actually collaborate. It feels so good to have even thirty minutes to plan things together. Hopefully we'll find a way to make this planning time happen more consistently.

Off to bed (quite late tonight!)

New Stuff on TPT

I just spent hours making this heart clipart. And I'm not sure anyone's going to buy it, but I really enjoy making things look pretty! Check out my cover page :)

If you're interested, it's on sale until Valentine's Day - this Thursday!! Buy it here!

My other recent addition is the health theme easy reader, which I did with my kids last week. After reading the book to the whole group and discussing the different things we do to stay healthy, I took 3-4 kids together at a time to read the book together. I love these small group reading times, because we work on so many things! Sight words and letter sounds, but also vocabulary and, well, life. It gives me a chance to get a bit deeper into the topic with a small group. After we did this book activity, we had snack and then one of my children went back into the classroom and picked up the Arctic book we did a few weeks ago, and started reading it! I was so proud! I love to keep the bigger reader on our bookshelf just for that reason!

Check it out here!

Snow and Ice

Snowman Names

I have done this for a couple of years now. I have to make quite small circles to ensure the longer names will fit on the A4 paper. Then I have the children tell me how many circles they need for their name - they have to count the letters in their names and add one if they want a separate ball for a face. One girl actually just turned the L of her name into the nose for his face - so cute!

Then the kids cut out the circles, wrote the letters on them, and build their snowmen. We looked at all of our snowmen and talked about which ones were the tallest/shortest or which were the same size.

Animal Tracks in the Snow

First, we mixed our own simple play dough (1 c. salt, 4 c. flour, 1 c. water - we had to add a bit more water) - this recipe was enough play dough for ten children.

We didn't have time to complete our activity in the morning, so I wrapped up the play dough in cellophane and we got back to it in the afternoon.

Each child got one clump of play dough. I modeled how to make a sphere and then flatten it into a pancake. Next, we got out the plastic animals to make tracks in the "snow." We placed the creations on paper (with names) and onto the heater to dry. It takes a few days to dry totally through, but it's mostly hard already after one day. The paper does stick a little bit to the dough, but it's not a huge problem.

Don't forget the cleaning up! In the past, I have done similar activities and then spent about twenty minutes cleaning dough or paint off of these tiny plastic feet. This year I had an idea - the kids can bathe the animals! We put warm water and dish soap into the tubs in our water tables and let the kids go at it. It did leave a bit of mess (just water) on the floor, but it was a great activity for the kids. They were involved in every step of this activity and I love that!

Frozen Paint

Another teacher in our school made frozen paint pops and invited us to use them that week. She simply put paint into plastic yogurt containers, added a popsicle stick, and placed them in the freezer. They were pretty interesting to paint with (it was a little difficult to get some of them out of the containers), and the kids had a great time. Here are some of their creations:

P for Pink and Purple Potato Prints!

How many letter P words can we jam into one activity?

Although we had pink and purple paint at school, I decided it's always more fun to do it ourselves! In fact, lately I am really trying to make a point to let the kids do the absolute most they can - in terms of passing things out, preparing materials for a craft, cleaning up, helping each other do the tricky things - and they love it! A friend of mine told me a couple of years ago about "Ask three before me." Especially when it's time to get dressed and go outside, I remind the children to ask three friends for help before asking a teacher. Children often approach me later to tell me how they helped one of their friends get dressed. Great!

Anyway, here are our pink and purple potato prints for P art!