This year, after Easter, I somehow ended up with several bags of extra jelly beans ... I obviously thought I hadn't purchased them more than once! What's one to do with so many leftover sweets... ?
We played with them of course!
First, I put a bunch of big & little jelly beans in a tray with some toothpicks. I showed my 3 1/2 year old how to push the toothpicks into the jelly beans and connect them to make shapes. This was pretty difficult for him to accomplish & he poked his little fingers more than a few times. However, he was very interested & motivated to figure it out. He did eventually figure it out -- with close supervision, there were no major injuries and plenty of fine motor practice & early engineering going on...
A few days later, we added a bowl of jelly beans to some homemade Kool-Aid play dough... and made lots of interesting foods...
Here are a few of our creations...
The jelly bean color same off on our play dough as we played & the whole activity was sticky, but yummy smelling & tons of fun!
My toddler (he's 2 1/2) and I did some fun fall activities this afternoon that I thought I'd share. First, we made some pumpkin pie/spice scented microwave play dough.
I didn't have any cream of tartar, so we roughly followed the following recipe:
1 cup flour
1/2 cup salt
1 Tbs vinegar
1 Tbs oil
1 Tbs vanilla extract
1 tsp+ pumpkin pie spice
1 tsp+ cinnamon
1. mix all dry ingredients together in a bowl
2. stir in wet ingredients (it looks pretty wet)
3. microwave in increments of 30 seconds, stirring in between heatings until doughy consistency is achieved - about 3 minutes for us. ( I didn't take a picture of this because my son was screaming that he wanted to help; I was busy convincing him that it was too hot for him to help with)
4. knead until smooth (careful it's VERY hot!)
5. then get creative! We added items from our nature walk earlier in the day - leaves, sticks and acorns. Here are our creations:
Later in the day, we used some of our leaves from our nature walk to for a painting activity that I saw on pinterst (darn pinterest... ).
First, I taped the leaves to some newspaper with some painters tape, then I taped the newspaper to the table. I made my little one take off his shirt because I didn't have any paint other than acrylic, so I didn't want to ruin his shirt. Then I gave him a brush and some red and yellow paint and he went to town. he Was very serious at first... then loosened up.
After he was done painting the leaves, I took a few pieces of scrap paper from some big old books that I keep around for projects like this and laid them over top to make 'prints.' They came out cute, but you can't really tell that they're leaves.
Have you been doing any fun fall activities? I'd loved to hear about them....
This week, we read "Green Eggs and Ham" by Dr. Seuss. The students really enjoyed this book - especially shouting 'NO!' every time Sam asked about eating the green eggs and ham!
Green Eggs and Ham Sensory Bin
I LOVE our Green Eggs and Ham sensory bin! There are tons of fun things int his bin - the kids' favorite things are the felt eggs and ham inside of the mini plastic eggs. They've been 'cooking' up interesting plate fulls of green grass, green eggs, green ham and multicolored pom poms for my assistant and I to 'eat' - mmm yummy!
I made lots of adaptations to the reading of this story so that all of my students could get into the story and understand it on their level. Interestingly enough, this book works great for multiple speech, language and listening goals.
I was able to incorporate many 'listening' sounds and phrases into our reading to keep students who are just learning to attend to sounds and words interested in the book:
eggs/ham - mmm yummy
mouse - squeak
car - beep beep
train - ooo-ooo
rain - "it's raining its pouring.."
boat - buh-buh + "row row row your boat..."
goat - maaah
tree - up, up, up
crazy train tracks - up, up, up wee!
falling into the water - uh-oh!
The simplified version of the story when something like this:
Sam: Do you like green eggs and ham?
Man: No, no, no! I don't like them!
Read & REPEAT...
I paired the simplified story with reading the actual rhyming text and threw in the 'sound effects' as we went...
We made Green Glitter letter G's and Painted with lots of Green... what a mess! I think we'll hand up all of these green pages in the hall like a giant green quilt mural. Green's a great color for spring :)
Green Finger painting
We made a plate of green eggs and ham. The kids watched me put the pieces together to make the completed plate of green eggs and ham, then had to figure out how to do it themselves - kind of like a puzzle. They did pretty good remembering how I made mine and copying the steps themselves. There's also our Cat in the Hat letter C's too!
Green Eggs and Ham Craft
We also played "Who at the Green Eggs and Ham" Card Game from Elaine over at the Schoolhouse blog. Once the students realized it was a funny game and that getting the Green Eggs and Ham card wasn't a 'bad' thing, they enjoyed it.
Who at the Green Eggs and Ham? Wasn't me...
To finish out our week of Green Eggs, we had planned to eat green eggs and watch the old green eggs cartoon on Youtube, but I forgot the eggs... The kids enjoyed the movie anyway though. Perhaps next week we'll get to the eggs...
