SCENTED PAINTING

Focusing on different kinds of sensory projects I decided painting with scents would be fun! and it turned out to even be a little bit funny watching the little dudes face when he smelled some smells he didn't quite like.

I mixed oregano, cinnamon, and nutmeg with watercolor and glue to make a sort of thick paint. I thought of doing the seasonings with their natural color but decided it would be more fun making them different colors.

The activity turned out great and its fun to sort of make our own scratch and sniff papers when they dried!

5 Clean Squeaky Pigs Flannel Board Story

Great idea borrowed from Story Time Katie

5 Clean Pigs

Five pigs so squeaky clean

Cleanest you’ve ever seen

Wanted to go outside and play

Oink! Oink!

One jumped into the mud

Landed with a great big THUD

They there were four clean squeaky pigs

Squish Squish

3…

2…

1 pig so squeaky clean

Cleanest you’ve ever seen

Wanted to go outside and play

Oink! Oink!

He jumped into the mud

Landed with a great big THUD

Then there were five quite dirty pigs!

Materials needed:

-Five double sided felt pigs
-One felt mud pile

-One fence surrounding mud pile

What needs to be done ahead of time? Five felt pigs. On one side of the pig have it be clean and on the other side of the pig have it be dirty. Paint brown smudges on one side to mimic the mud.  Have a brown felt mudpile for the pigs to jump into.

How is the activity set up? Place the mud pile to the left of the five pigs. As you sing and as the pigs jump into the mud flip them so that they are now dirty pigs.

Jellyfish and Shark Puppets with poem

Five Little Jellyfish

5 little jellyfish floating in the sea  (5 fingers moving slowly)

1 shark says, “Looks yummy to me!”

(Hold up 1 finger and then rub belly)

The shark swims up quiet as can be and EATS a little jellyfish floating in the sea

(Whisper with shark fins on head, then clap to eat)

4 little jellyfish floating in the sea…

3 little jellyfish floating in the sea…

2 little jellyfish floating in the sea…

1 little jellyfish floating in the sea…

To make the jellyfish finger puppets I just folded over some of the remaining felt and hot glued them half shut so that they would fit on fingers. I measured off of my fingers and just made them a little tighter imagining little fingers instead. 

Materials:

-1 shark puppet

-5 jellyfish finger puppets (I made 12)

Use:

Start with each child having a jellyfish. While the poem says five jellyfish you can either repeat with five until everyone gets a turn or give out all the jellyfish and start out with how many children you have in the class. When you get to the shark eating the jellyfish stand up, walk around, and choose a jellyfish you, as the shark will eat. Eat all the jellyfish and they if the children would like start over choosing a child to be the shark this time.  Remind the children every one will get a turn if they want one. To make the group time go by fast if the children are being impatient only allow the children to eat one jellyfish at a time.

March Madness!!

Painting with legos I set out three legos that were all different sizes. Using the colors blue, yellow and green I let him explore the different shapes the legos would print. When I told him we were going to paint with legos he was so excited because to him that it not what lego are for. It was a really fun painting activity. I also gave him a large piece of poster board to paint on to make it an extreme painting activity. The legos made such a cool print on both sides it was really a cool art project. We were able to discuss into detail words like "medium, large, bigger, middle.."

   

We also painted with balloons. I filled one ballon with air and one balloon with sand (which without a funnel was kind of a pain in the butt) Then using blue and yellow paint again I let him paint with the balloons. I again used larger than normal paper to really give the room he needed to paint. 

 SLIME! how much fun is slime! for my slime I use borax and school glue. I made two separate slimes in the colors of yellow and blue again so he could mix them into a pretty green color. I allow him to use plastic scissors on the slime to help enhance his fine motor skills which can help him become a better writer later on. We also used strawberry baskets to show how the slime moves when it is at rest. We did not have that much patience though as the slime was very slow but it was cool to see.

 St. Patricks Day collage! We go to our local libraries story time and they of course talked about St. Patricks day so I knew we had to do something for it. I cut out little gold "coins" from gold scrapbook paper. Before we even glued them on the little dude wanted to count out how many gold coins we had. I also cut out little paper squares of the rainbow colors and posted a picture of a rainbow hoping he would put the colors in order by himself. I also had different shades of green shamrocks for him to glue as well.

 Coffee filter art! Using eyedroppers I used yellow water color and blue water color to cover the coffee filter with. These always turn out so cool and I love using them as sun catchers on the window because the light really shines through and makes them look really pretty. It is also such a fun activity watching the colors spread and seeing how fast they mix together.

 We also after we did the green ones decided to make rainbow ones as well so we added the color red to watch it mix with the  blue and yellow.

Beginning of February

FEBRUARY the time of year to talk about love and show everyone who you love! 

We have started february with some crafts and art projects showcasing hearts of course
We are going to be counting to twenty in a number match on our "Love Bugs" starting with lady bugs 1-5. We are also going to be doing butterflies, caterpillars and snails the same way. While this is a closed ended project I just make sure we even it out with other open ended projects like our valentine making and painting with heart cookie cutters.

Here we organized different shape hearts onto one giant heart. We talked about the different sizes and different words for each size. Big can be giant, huge, large! while small can be tiny, teeny, itsy and so on! a great way to learn new vocabulary and get a better feel for the size of things.

 

 Here is the beginning of our counting love bugs. Starting with one giant lady bug with heart spots we then matched the numbers 1-5 to smaller lady bugs. We will be doing to rest of our love bugs soon. While this is very closed ended I knew we had to practice our one to one correspondence. Crafts like this are only things I would really do with one or two children just because it was a lot of set up and would definitely have to be adapted to use in a classroom.

To balance out between the closed ended projects I do open ended projects which means there is no certain outcome to expect. Open ended projects are really to help the child become proud of their work, build self esteem and experiment. They also help teachers who specialize in development learn about the children and see if they are in the right stage of development. We made valentines to send out to our families and friends which I forgot to take pictures of before they were mailed off but we also have done some free painting and cookie cutter painting!