{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?

Peek @ the Week

I've been so busy lately that I haven't had much time to post the last two weeks... here's a quick peek at what we've been up to this week!

We've been reading books about food, fall and family in preparation for Thanksgiving! Here's our bookshelf this week:

We've focused heavily on the books "Feast for 10" by Cathryn Falwell and "Today is Monday" by Eric Carle.

We're working on a take home book based on "Feast for 10" .... here's our artwork so far - 2 pumpkins, 3 chickens, 6 bunches of greens and 7 pickles... 

Our sensory bin the week has a variety of beans, play food, pots, pans, funnels, spoons etc.

Here's one of our morning work activities - bean sorting.

I introduced some light play using an overhead projector with a handful of translucent plastic leaves, leaf shaped sequins (table scatter decor from the craft store) and plastic letter tiles.

And we learned about letter 'L' for leaves since the leaves are still turning colors and falling - Here's our Rainbow writing letter 'L' with smashed up leaves sprinkled over glue. Simple but fun!

That's all for now... what are you up to this week?

{sticks & stuff} Christmas Ornaments

Aside from being today's featured guest post over at Tutus & Tea Parties, I haven't really thought much about the upcoming holiday season. I usually don't start thinking about Christmas until after Thanksgiving... but I made an exception this year!

Check back soon for more of my ideas for nature inspired ornament crafts!

{5 Fun Magazine Letter Ideas}

I must admit that I've got a serious thing for cutting up old magazines... It's nothing new. For me, there's just something mind-numbingly wonderful about cutting up paper. My love for paper has followed me from childhood to adulthood and now into my classroom - here are some of my favorite ways to use magazine letters with my students!

1. Letter ID Activities - Magazine letters are great for building letter recognition skills because there are so many different font colors, sizes & styles. At this level, I have students 'search, cut & paste' a single target letter using my printable magazine letters and alphabet worksheets. I also use this FREEBIE Letter Hunt worksheet for finding & matching all letters of the alphabet.

2. Upper & Lowercase Matching - Once students begin recognizing and learning letter names, I like to take advantage of the varied font styles for upper and lowercase matching practice. This is especially important for letters like 'Aa' - we teach students to write a lowercase 'a' one way, and we expect them to be able to recognize a letter 'a' in another way. These letter dominoes are one of my favorite ways to work on upper & lowercase matching; they also lend themselves for uppercase matching and 'traditional' dominoes type play for upper and lowercase matching with more capable students.

3. Sorting - There are so many ways to sort letters. With my very young students, we start by sorting letters by color, size, and shape. Then I provide two well known letters to sort and increase difficulty from there. We use different sorting strategies and visual organizers - I LOVE when my students come up with new sorting rules and ways of organizing their letters! 

4. Name Practice - What little kid doesn't love making something wonderful with their name? Last year, we made name plates for cubbies with my printable magazine letters. I printed each child's name on a sentence strip, provided pages of my printable magazine letters and glue to construct 'ransom note' inspired name tags; we laminated the names used them for cubby tags.

5. Sight Word & Spelling Word Practice - With older students, magazine letters are a fun hands-on way to practice spelling. It's much more than just writing the words out, students must find, cut, arrange and glue letters for this task. Great as a literacy center, morning work activities or for daily word work!

For most of the above activites, I've used a combination of printable magazine letter cutouts from my TpT or TN stores and real letter cutouts.

What other ways do you enjoy using magazine letters in your classroom? More ideas coming soon!

Friday was yesterday...

Time has been flying by - being incredibly busy makes the week go by fast, but I feel like I've barely had time to breathe lately!

Here's my Five for Friday recap - a day late:

1. Goldilocks & the Three Bears - We read this classic in preschool this week. The kids were slow to warm up to the story, which surprised me, but I decided to give a few more reads before giving up on it entirely. I'm glad I did! By Friday, all the kids were excitedly retelling parts of the story and enjoying the Three Bear themed activities that I had pulled together. I had a collection of story telling props that we used during reading and than transferred those items to our doll house; introducing the bears to the doll house area was a fantastic way to get the boys engaged in an area that I rarely see them play in. I also like to read Brinton Turkle's wordless picture book, "Deep in the Forest," which has a similar storyline except it's a bear that enters a people house. We had fun looking for similarities and differences between the stories.

2. Oatmeal Sensory Bin - in the spirit of our story this week, I whipped up an oatmeal sensory bin. So simple and inexpensive, yet so much fun. I raided the kitchen for small, medium and large cups, bowls, spoons and plates so that we could reinforce the size concepts from the book. Unfortunately, I forgot that the other PreK teacher at my school is allergic to oatmeal! So when our kids got together (which happens daily!), I had to make sure it was put away and cleaned up! It won't last another week because of the allergy issue... on to beans next week!

3. Fingerpainting! This messy activity is always a favorite. My students could spend at least an hour fingerpainting, too bad we can't do it all day. We'll be cutting out and laminating these leaves for our classroom tree - which I've been delinquent in posting pictures of ....

4. This week, I worked on a guest post for Tutus & Tea Parties. Look for my "Sticks & Stuff: Xmas Ornaments" sometime next week!

5. Five more weeks until my course for professional development is finished. It's turning out to be an interesting experience and I'm actually looking forward to my field work at a nearby Reggio-inspsired childcare center.