Eggs, Eggs and MORE Eggs!!

In the weeks leading up to Easter, I decided to take advantage of the abundance of inexpensive plastic Easter eggs from the Dollar Tree and the really cool project ideas on Pinterest. Here are the games that i made. I would put these out as special center options or special game time with me!

From this pin, I got the idea to make a matching game with the alphabet letters. It's a great review tool and a unique way to do a matching game than with just cards.

I also did the same thing with the numbers that we study in our class, 1-30. (This one is a little trickier than the alphabet, but my kids do a great job of trying!)

And don't forget our shapes that we study!

I wonder how something like that would work with word families??

From this pin, I got the idea for this SUPER CUTE mix, match and sort game. I mean how cute is this?? All you need is some felt, hot glue, eggs and an empty egg carton!

The Dollar Tree also had some cute crystal and patterned eggs that I got to make a mix and match game. the kids love it.

To add to these egg-cellent games, Walmart had a cute Pickup sticks game that came in a carrot and a bunny tic-tac-toe. Why not, right??

I love it!

Flowers! (Y, 22, Yellow, Rectangle)

Our theme this week was "Flowers" and we focused on the letter Y, number 22 and we revisited the color yellow and square rectangle.

Our school is also getting ready for our Art Show. all the projects are completed I will take pictures and show you our super cool "Garden". It's getting exiting! This weeks little preview.... our Pumpkin Plant!

We read this week: Mortimer's First Garden by Karma Wilson
                               Arthur's Chicken Pox by Marc Brown
                               The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack
                               The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle
                               The Pigeon Wants a Puppy by Mo Willems

Our question of the week was "What kind of food do you think is super yummy?"

For our theme of the week, we sorted flowers again. Since we did this last week as a group, this time I just put the flowers out and let the kids play their own sorting game.

Okay, so celery is not really a flower, but we talked about how plants and flowers drink their water up from the ground and I thought the best way to illustrate that would be the celery experiment!
SUPER SIMPLE TO DO!
I got 4 celery stalks (full stalks with the leaves at the top) and put one in plain water, and one in each dyed water blue, yellow and red. I showed the class the set up and we made hypotheses about what would happen to the celery. (I made the worksheet up for this one).

Then we looked at the celery that had been sitting in the water for a few hours t osee what actually happened. That was what we recorded on our papers.

Just for fun I kept the celery around to the end of the week and it looked SO COOL!

We made yarn flowers! Ahead of time I cut out pieces of string in different colors. When they came over to my small group table I "drew" a flower in glue for them to cover in the yarn. I thought it was a nice little variance on strengthening their fine motor skills.

Our song of the week was "Pretty Flowers" to the tune of  Jingle bells from here.

"Pretty flowers, pretty flowers,

Growing everywhere.

Here are some pretty flowers

For your coat or hair.

Pretty flowers, pretty flowers,

Gold and pink and blue.

Red and yellow, orange and purple,

I picked them just for you!"

(C) 2001 - 2011 Jean Warren www.preschoolexpress.com

We talked again about the color yellow. Bonus that it starts with our letter of the week!

We made a book about things that are the color yellow.

We talked about the shape rectangle. We made a list and walked around the classroom trying to find things that are the shape.

I also asked the children to practice finding and recognizing rectangles on a worksheet. It came from the book Alphabet, Colors, Numbers and Shapes.

When we worked on our number activities, we practiced writing the number and word for the number 22.

I made these worksheets that reinforces the one to one concept. The kids practice writing the number and have to color a square for each picture that they see.

For our letter activities, we used our handwriting sheet for the letter Yy from this book.

The students wrote in their journals for the letter y. It's really cool to see the children thinking about what they want to put in their journal. They love these books and always want to go through them when they're finished writing for the day.

We turned a Y into a Yellow Jacket! This book is great.

This book has great pages for helping the kids work on the letter recognition of both the capital and the lowercase versions of the letter, and they are always a little different, which is great!

We made a book about things that we did yesterday! I love making class books, because they can go through and look at them later to see the great work that they and their friends did! I got the idea for the book from Alphabet on Parade.

They made a little flip book about a yellow yo-yo from the Letter of the Week Book 2.

For our alphabet wall we made yaks! I got the picture of the yak from the Letter of the Week Book 1. Then the kids glued on some yarn!

Here are the words we came up with this week!

Up next week: "The Week of The Young Child/Hop-a-thon!" and a focus on the letter Zz, number 23, color purple and oval.

Spring has Sprung! (X, 21, Pink, Square)

Our theme this week was "Spring has Sprung" and we focused on the letter X, number 21 and we revisited the color pink and square shape.

Our school is also getting ready for our Art Show. all the projects are completed I will take pictures and show you our super cool "Garden". I can't wait! this weeks little preview.... Flowers!

We read this week: Fletcher and the Springtime Blossoms by Julia Rawlinson
                              Little Hoot by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
                              The Story of the Root Children by Sibylle von Olfers
                              Llama Llama Time to Share by Anna Dewdney
                              Bear's New Friend by Karma Wilson

Our question of the week was "What is your favorite flower?"

For our theme of the week, we brainstormed a list of things that will tell us if Spring is really here.

Then we went out on our school nature trail to see if we could find any!

I made a set of flowers that I "laminated" with contact paper. I asked the kids to sort them. I made the set so that they could be sorted by color of the petals or number of the petals. They did so great!

We also painted with some flowers.

Our song of the week was "Pretty Little Flower" to the tune of the 'itsy, bitsy spider' from here!

"Pretty little flower, smiling at the sun.
Down comes the rain, now she looks so glum.
Back comes the sun and dries up all the rain.
And the pretty little flower, is smiling once again!"

(C) 2001 - 2011 Jean Warren www.preschoolexpress.com

We talked again about the color pink.The kids loved revisiting our pink song from this week!

We talked about the shape square and brainstormed different things that are a square shape. then we turned it into a book!

The kids used this worksheet to work on their square and shape recognition. It came from the book Alphabet, Colors, Numbers and Shapes.

When we worked on our number activities, we practiced writing the number and word for the number 21.

I made these worksheets that reinforces the one to one concept. The kids practice writing the number and have to color a square for each picture that they see.

For our letter activities, we used our handwriting sheet for the letter Xx from this book.

The students wrote in their journals for the letter x. It's really cool to see the children thinking about what they want to put in their journal. They love these books and always want to go through them when they're finished writing for the day.

We turned a X into a X-ray Fish! This book is great.

This book has great pages for helping the kids work on the letter recognition of both the capital and the lowercase versions of the letter, and they are always a little different, which is great!

The kids made a book called "What's Inside X-Ray Eyes?" from the Letter of the Week Book 1. 

They worked on coloring a picture using a key. My class really seems to enjoy pages like this because they feel really proud when they're finished, because they've pretty much done it all by themselves! I got this page from a former teacher, but it says it's from education.com.

For our alphabet wall we made x-ray fish! (There's really not a whole lot out there to do with the letter x!)

Here are the words we came up with this week!

Up next week: "Flowers!" and a focus on the letter Yy, number 22, color  and .