I like using seasonal and fun things like candy canes to teach about things that I want Sean Patrick to learn or to practice.
Sean Patrick is familiar with patterns and he likes to finger-paint a lot, but he still needs a lot of practice so we are still working with AB patterns.
So, we are going to finish these patterns by taking turns.
For the first candy cane I will paint one color and he will paint the next.
Then, we will switch for the second candy cane. He will paint with the color I used the first time, and then I will paint with the other color.
Finally, I am going to ask him if he wants to make up another pattern on a blank template.
Here is a short video of us painting our second template – it is spur of the moment iPhone videoing so you get to see the real-life clip of our flighty pattern painting moment.
Today, I am sharing a template with you so that your little one can make a personalized headdress.
I always loved doing holiday crafts as a kid, so I am trying to keep that tradition going!
I got this craft idea when I went to my son’s Thanksgiving Feast.
The kids wore headdresses and one class had Native American nicknames written on their headbands, but I thought it would be cute to try it on the feathers.
I thought, I could do that. And as you may know, I like reproducible activities.
So, I made this template for you.
The feathers have upper case letters, lower case letters, and numbers so there are lots of directions you can take this craft.
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When I did this at home:
My goal today was simply to get Sean Patrick to put the letters of his name in order after I scrambled them up, and give him a fun accessory to wear to go with all of his little Indian songs he has learned.
So, I scrambled them up and asked him to find the letters in his name. He found S, then ‘e,’ then ‘a,’ then ‘n,’ etc., colored them, and then I taped them onto his headband that I cut from a brown paper bag..
You Could:
1) Use this as a number order activity or assessment by teaching your little one to put the feathers in order from 0-9 and then mix the feathers up and see if your little one can put them in order himself.
2) Let your kiddos come up with names for their stuffed animals, put small feather headbands on stuffed animals heads (use a print setting that prints multiple pages at onto one sheet of paper to print small feathers).
3) Place paper feathers on the inside of construction paper to give it a pop of color if you don’t print them onto colored paper or if you children don’t color them in much.
Y’all, I love Pinterest; I do, but I have to say – I do NOT like activities that I can not do with my kids almost immediately after I browse.
If I browse during nap time, I want to do the activities that I find that same afternoon. I like to get my inspiration from pinterest but then I want to actually DO the activities. Why use a pinboard if I don’t turn the ideas into experiences?
I think I have finally figured out what to do with my not-so-parent-friendly pins… Lately, if I see an activity that I can’t do right away, I find out a way to make a printable for it. That way, other moms can simply pin it, print it, and make it happen that day if they want to.
I also like sharing my experiences so that you feel that much more prepared to make the most of the activity… which is why I added an “ideas” page to my printable:
Yesterday:
1) I made the November Corn Printable during nap time, but I only printed one page. I printed a page of corn that had the numbers on the husks.
2) I put a small handful of candy corn in a cup.
**The order of teaching something is always I DO (I will talk about it and show my child an example), WE DO (we will do it together), YOU DO (encourage my child to try it on his own).
So, I DO first:
3) I talked to my three year old “Today we are going to use candy corn to fill the ears of corn, but we will stop counting the candy corn when we get to the number that is on the corn. Watch mommy…. See this is the number ONE, so mommy is going to count out candy corn until I get to ONE. (I place one candy corn on the corn with the number one and say “One!”) “Okay I am going to stop right there because I counted to the number on the corn.”
WE DO:
“What do you think this number is (pointing to two)?” (Two).
“Yes and two comes after one. Can we put the candy corn on that ear of corn while we count to two?” (one, two).
“Wow you are so good at this! Do you know what number this is if this is one, that is two, then this might be….” (Three!)
YOU DO:
“Yes, your turn, can you put three candy corns on top of the corn?”
4) We did this page again and then we ate the candy corn, but if your little one doesn’t like the taste of candy corn, it’s okay… I included little candy corn cut-outs so you can glue them on your candy corn. 🙂
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So, PIN this printable if you like it, and follow me if you’d like to see all the things I plan to do with my kids each month!
My original Pin-spiration was Candy Corn Counting – (I literally just ran out of construction paper and I love to make and save printables). Thanks No Time For FlashCards. 🙂
Isn’t Corny Math is A-Maize-ing ? {Okay, I think I’m done}
In the spirit of Halloween, I wanted to do an art project with my 4-year-old while my 6-year-old was at school. My middle child loves and cherishes this one-on-one time with Mommy. Jess’ post on Monday inspired us to make our own Jack-O-Lanterns, but I had a different objective in mind.
I was also inspired by a “find the differences” book I was reading with Leyson that has two near-identical pictures side by side, but with subtle differences. Each page asks you to “find (x-amount of) differences” which may be as simple as the omission of an object in the picture or a change of color, shape, size or placement of an object.
The objective of our activity was for my son to be able to both point out and fix the differences between my picture and his picture to make them the same, and also to recreate the picture I created… in this case, a pumpkin.
Materials needed: construction paper, scissors, maybe some glue after the activity 🙂
Mommy Prep: Using orange construction paper, I cut out two large pumpkin shapes, and lots of different sized rectangles*, triangles, circles, squares and other various shapes with brown, yellow and black paper.
*I cut out 4 different types of rectangle stems to bring in some vocabulary to our activity: short, long, thick, thin
Leyson first had to close his eyes (or cover his face with a blanket because I learned that I can’t trust him to keep his eyes closed) and count to twenty while I arranged the different shapes to make a face on my pumpkin. Apparently, counting to twenty now means omitting numbers 14 and 19, so we will be working on that again soon.
I started off with a simple face. Two circles for eyes, a circle for a nose, a fat, brown rectangle and a U-shape for a smiley mouth.
When he got to 20, he pulled the blanket off of his face, he had to use the remaining shapes to make his pumpkin look just like my pumpkin.
To make the project more challenging in other rounds, I layered some of the shapes such as using smaller circles on top of larger circles for the eyes.
The most difficult part of the activity was when I used only triangles to make a face and he had to figure out which direction the triangles were facing. It’s harder than it looks!
We experimented with all the different things we could learn from making pumpkins:
Feelings/Emotions: We made happy pumpkins, and sad pumpkins, and angry pumpkins, and scared pumpkins… and talked about why each pumpkin was feeling the way they were feeling.
Counting/More or Less: Sometimes Mommy’s pumpkin had 4 teeth, sometimes it had more or less.
Compare and Contrast: “What is different about the nose on your pumpkin and the nose on my pumpkin?” “Do our pumpkins have the same shaped mouth?”
Vocabulary: Colors, shapes, sizes, parts of the face
Spacial Awareness: “Are the eyes close together or far apart?” “If you put the eyes in the middle of the pumpkin, can we fit a nose and a mouth too?”
Phonemic Awareness & Writing: We segmented the sounds in pumpkin /p/ /u/ /m/ /p/ /k/ /i/ /n/… which is pretty hard to do when your child pronounces it like “po’kin” but we wrote the real word on the back of our project.
When you are finished the activity, grab some glue so you can add some Halloween decor to your house!
Who needs to buy decorations from the store, when with a little glue and tape you can make your house ready for any holiday?!
I was inspired by another mommy teacher and finally got my act together and started hanging our Fall activities on the blinds of the playroom and it got me SO motivated to purpose even more seasonal teaching moments.
I am not over-zealous… I purpose one activity a day… and today’s activity was “Bat- Math.” I wanted to give y’all the step-by-step breakdown in case you wanted to print this FREE Bat-Math Printable and have some duh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh da nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh BAT – MATH. Sorry, had to set the tone for this.
The way that my mini bat-math lesson started is funny… I found a VERY simple page with the outline of 10 bats in an Elmo activity book (by the Count) and I thought…
Today, Sean Patrick is going to learn that The LAST NUMBER he says when counting is the AMOUNT of bats that there are on this page. (I know that that is an abnormal thought). That is a common core math standard – that children can simply recognize that the last number they say represents the amount in the group they are counting. (Example: If there are 5 bats on the page then when I count 1-2-3-4-5, I know that there are FIVE bats because it was the last number that I said when I counted the last bat).
I started with too many – I will be honest. The page had 10 bats. He can count to 10 but I wish I would’ve started with 5…. which is why I made this free printable with 5 and with 10 because you know your kiddo and can choose.
First I said “Alright Sean Patrick… today lets cover up each one of these bats with skittles. Each bat gets ONE skittle so that we can count how many bats there are. When we figure out the right number of bats then we can eat that many skittles!” (once again… he normally only gets to eat THREE skittles so I wish I would’ve started with my own printable haha).
He covered up each bat (one skittle on each bat) and then started to count. He counted slow – one number for each skittle which is GREAT, but he miscounted because he didn’t count strategically (he started at the bottom and jumped up and around) so I said “Okay baby, try counting from the top then over, and go to the next line so we can count the right number. “
He tried again and he said “ten” but kept counting.
So I said “That was great counting…. lets try it one more time and when I say STOP, try to remember the number that you said!”
He counted it again and then I said “What was the last number you just counted to?”…. he said “five” haha okay this is great….this is the moment I realized 10 was too high to count a group number, and it was the moment that I realized we could work on this one skill all week.
Then we counted it again and I said “Did you hear yourself count to ten…. watch mommy and listen…. I shouted “10!” when I counted to that number and then said “How many?” and he finally said “Ten!”
I said “YEAH! lets celebrate great counting… eat your treats and then we will give all TEN bats a sticker, then we can color them. Let’s put the stickers on in the same “smart way” to count…. from the top to the bottom.
He was content with coloring just one bat so we glued the “finished” product onto a black sheet of construction paper and hung it up on our “fall art” wall…. (which I will share the play-by-plays of those activities next week).
