Jelly Beans & Playdoh - Easter Leftovers

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!

Snow Day & Snowmen

Snow day off school and my toddler is napping ... it's a perfect opportunity to catch up on blogging - or my lack of blogging during the past week. I've been busy with preschool shenanigans, university end-of-semester tasks and holiday preparations at home. Managed to get our Christmas tree up - while not as organized as usual, it's up and my toddler LOVED decorating it - that's all that matters really!

We've been reading lots of Christmas books at our house lately. I had wanted to post a whole 25 days of Christmas reading, but couldn't get it together fast enough. However, we will be doing a '12 Days of Christmas Books' with some great vintage books and some new favorites ... stay tuned beginning December 13 -- I'll be sharing our favorite books in posts between the 13th and 25th of the month... probably a few at a time rather than one every day (I'm just not that organized to write a post a day!)

As for what's been going on at preschool, here are a few of our pictures from last week that I never got around to posting....

 We made a big ball of sparkly snow play-doh roughly using the microwave dough recipe from a while back.  I can't say we were champs at measuring this time, but it worked out well - microwaving did take extra time because we made a quadruple size batch! I put out assorted odds and ends for making a snowman and let the kids go to town.

Check out the biggest snowman with the black beads on the sides of its head -- those are hearing aids! I've got a student who has recently become very aware of his hearing aids and has started putting hearing aids on all of his drawings, sculptures ect.

The sparkles in the dough were about a cup or two of Buffalo Snow that I picked up on clearance somewhere last year. It makes a heck of a mess by itself, but in playdoh, it's really quite charming!

I also changed out the materials for light play and introduced a couple of sheets of cheap snowflake window clings. The kids are still getting the idea of the whole 'light play' thing... and many of them just aren't all that interested in it yet, but we'll keep trying to find just the right materials that catch their interest...

We sang "Five Little Snowflakes" (to the tune of "Twinkle Twinkle") with the snowflakes, adding one at a time with each verse, and overhead that went something like this:

One little snowflake with nothing to do 

along came another, then there were two 

Two little snowflakes playing with me

along came another, then there were three 

Three little snowflakes calling for more

along came another, then there were four

Four little snowflakes dip and dive

along came another, then there were five 

Five little snowflakes having so much fun

whoooo! went the wind, then there were none!

I can't say that I remember where it came from, but there are similar versions all over the internet!

Lastly, we made this simple letter craft. S is for snow ... or snowballs. Pretty simple.

I have to say that I've enjoyed my day off... catching up on house work, laundry, blogging, time with my own child... They're calling for more snow late tonight and early tomorrow morning... two snow days in a row? We'll see...

{Gobble, Gobble, Gobble}

With Thanksgiving quickly approaching, I've had turkeys on the brain lately. This weekend my toddler and I made some turkeys from pine cones - well I mainly made them, but my son enjoyed playing with them.

Here's the process... my pictures are not super organized, but you get the idea...

As I said, I did most of the crafting with this one, but my three year old did enjoy playing with them afterwards.

And, at preschool, we made these play-doh turkeys today...

They were a huge hit even though I didn't have all the 'right' items - like brown play-doh. The kids didn't seem to mind that our turkeys were yellow. What kind of turkey crafts have you been busy with?

Fall Leaves & Play Doh 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....

Dinosaurs!

A (long) while back, I mentioned how excited I was to do a Dinosaur Themed unit over the summer since I never have time to do this unit during the regular school year! Unfortunately, I never did get around to blogging about it. Since yesterday was letter 'D' day in the 31 Days of ABC's, I figured now was as good a time as any to play catch up!

Books! I went a little crazy with the dinosaur books during preparations and ended up  having more than enough to choose from for our classroom activities. Here's 10 of my students' favorite books, which include a nice mixture of fiction and non-fiction options:

The #1 favorite, by a long run, was Dinosaur Dig by Penny Dale. Who doesn't love dinosaurs AND heavy machinery in one book? It's a great little rhyming and counting book about dinosaurs digging and building a swimming pool. Somehow, I figured out that I could sing it to the tune of "99 Bottles" - singing songs with books really mesmerizes my students and increases their attention for a story exponentially! My PreK students seemed never to tire of this story and requested it everyday, over and over again.

Here's the rest of our list:

Ten Terrible Dinosaurs by Ken Stickland. -- This book was great for counting, vocabulary enrichment, talking about being kind - we used little dinos and lined them up during the story telling and took one at a time away as we read. We did end up modifying this book greatly to meet the needs of the students as much of the vocabulary was much too hard for my students.

Dinosaur Roar by Ken Stickland  -- We had fun acting out parts of this book with toy dinosaurs, talking about opposites, comparing the dinosaurs on each page, using lots of new adjectives & prepositions and exploring new vocabulary words like meek & weak etc.

Saturday Night at the Dinosaur Stomp by Carol Diggory Shields -- This story had great pictures and fun rhyming text, BUT was very difficult for me to read! It includes the full scientific names of many dinosaurs in the rhyming text, so here's your fair warning to practice reading it before trying to read it to your students! We ended up modifying this book lots too in order to share it with the kids so that they could understand the storyline - it was a hit though! 

How do Dinosaurs Eat their Food?  by Jane Yolen & Mark Teague  -- This one was an easy to read with great pictures.

If the Dinosaurs Came Back by Bernard Most -- A fun classic that I remember reading when I was little. The kids seemed to enjoy reading this one and thinking of what it might be like if they had a dinosaur as a pet. We painted dinosaurs in single colors to resemble the dinos from the book and added a photograph of each child  'riding' their dinosaurs for a wall display.

Dinosaur Bones by Bob Barner -- Cute rhyming story about dinosaurs. My kids loved the dinosaur tracks at the end of the book and the page with dinosaurs next to each other to compare sizes. The long neck dinosaur was everyone's favorite by far!

Dinosaur A-Z by Roger Priddy -- Great very realistic looking pictures! We didn't read this one very much, but the kids loved looking at the pictures in this one indpendently.

My Big Dinosaur Book by Roger Priddy -- Another collection of great realistic looking dinosaur pictures.

Dinosaurs Touch & Feel by Jeffrey Burton -- This one was a fun addition to our collection because of the touch & feel aspect. Lots of great textures, colors and pop ups to keep even reluctant little readers engaged. Although it was probably the 'youngest' book in the collection, they still enjoyed it just the same!

It seemed that ALL of the books went well with plastic dinosaur figurines as props. The students loved choosing a dinosaur and then copying the dinosaur actions from the books.






Dinosaur play! I managed to round up a whole bushel basket full of dinosaur figurines from yard sales and the dollar store so there were never any fights about dinosaurs since there were so many. I also (again went a little crazy) and made this dinosaur suitcase playset that I saw a tutorial on over at So You Think You're Crafty. Mine came out pretty good and the kids loved playing with it!

Dinosaur Suitcase Playset

Songs! We sang a few different songs about dinosaurs this summer too! We changed up the words to "If You're Happy and You Know It" to "If You're a Dino and You Know" and it was a huge hit with the kids.  It goes something like this:
If you're a dino and you know it 
Roar real loud
If you're a dino and you know it 
Roar real loud
If you're a dino and you know 
and you really want to show it 
If you're a dino and you know it 
Roar real loud

Action Variations:
Jump real high, roar real soft, turn around, wiggle your tail, clap your claws, stomp your feet, show your teeth, go to sleep etc.

Another one of the favorites was Dinosaur Stomp by Dan & Dani - here's the YouTube Video:




Activities! Here are a few pictures of our Dinosaur-a-Summer pictures:

Dinosaur painting like the dinosaurs from Bernard Most's book!

Plastic Dinosaurs in Playdoh make fun footprints!

Printables! We also used some of the games and activity sheets from my Dinosaur Discover early literacy and math pack which can be found in my TpT Store.

Dinosaur Theme Early Learning Activities

FREEBIES! And here are some FREE cut & paste dino activities that I put in my student's communication books for this unit (for at home carryover and reinforcement).

 

 How 'bout you? What other great dinosaur activities have you done with your kids?