Seasonal - The Mommy Teacher

We are Thankful for…

Last week, I had the extreme privilege of subbing for my son’s 1st grade classroom for the afternoon. This Mommy Teacher really misses the classroom so I was really excited to jump back in… if only for a little over 3 hours.

Well, it just so happened, that I had planned a Thanksgiving craft with my kids that evening, so I decided to bring some supplies and do it with James’ class, too… after all, this was one of my favorite activities to do in my own classroom each November…

I spoke to the kids about the month of November and it being a time to give thanks. I explained what thankfulness is and gave some reasons about why I was thankful. I then had each of the students say one thing that they were thankful for… guiding those who couldn’t think of something new. My favorite? “I am thankful for opportunities to be helpful,” referencing the different tasks the classroom helpers rotate each week. (And, of course, James being thankful for his mom ranks pretty high, too!)

I cut feathers out of construction paper and gave 3 to each student. The students had to come up with 3 things they were thankful for and write each on one of their feathers. At the end of our activity, we glued the feathers down and had a beautiful turkey! It gave James a great picture of what our own finished turkey would look like after 28 days…

That’s right, we are taking the whole month to make our turkey… two feathers at a time (one for each of my boys).

Day 1: James (6) is thankful for his little sister, and Leyson (4) is thankful for, well, Leyson! Since we are a few days into November, use your first day you do this activity to play catch up to get the kids used to talking about things they are thankful for.

One thing I am thankful for? All of our wonderful mommy teachers out there! Thank you for stopping by The Mommy Teacher! Please share your Thanksgiving crafts with us on Facebook!

UPDATE: This is Jessica (The not-artsy Mommy Teacher) wanting to share the printable I made tonight so that I could do this tomorrow. This is for the UN-artistic people who want to do this 😉 – (cough cough) namely for me and my kids !

Click here: Turkey Template Printable to get the simple turkey template for this activity OR click on the image above! 😉

November 4, 2013 by Casey | 8 Comments

Boo ! Trace and Color

The other day I made a simple template for a zoo trace and color to tote along in our wagon for down times, I am going to re-make it using my own clipart soon, but for now it looks like this:

Well, the VERY next day we were going to Boo at the Zoo so I wanted to mix it up and I had already made seasonal clipart so I toted this one along in the wagon…

I decided to make it a combined printable even though Halloween is right around the corner.

I thought you might want to tote this one around tomorrow on a walk and make it a scavenger hunt for decorations in the neighborhood so I figured I would go ahead and give ya this printable today! If you don’t use it this year, bookmark TheMommyTeacher and you can always keep it for next year !

Click here…. BOO Trace and Color

Enjoy!

October 29, 2013 by Jessica | 0 comments

Halloween Game {Heads Or Tails}

When we were “Boo’d” the other day, we got some stickers in our little surprise basket that I wanted to do something with, but couldn’t quite put my finger on what that should be.

Then, for some unknown reason…. the following activity popped into my brain….I turned the stickers into a “heads or tails” game with just 5 SIMPLE materials: 2 sheets of stickers, one piece of paper, a marker/sharpie, and a coin bigger than the smallest sticker on your sheet.

I placed a jack-o-lantern sticker on one side of the coin, a ghost sticker on another side of the coin,

and then made a SIMPLE sorting sheet by drawing a line down the middle of the page and one at the top. I place a sticker on either side of the sorting sheet.

I explained to Sean Patrick that we would flip the coin to see if it landed on heads (the jack-o-lantern) or tails (the ghost) and whatever it landed on would get to put that sticker on the chart under the matching sticker.

playing with my sticker template — The next day we played again using the sticker activity printable I made on the computer and I liked it better because it was easier to do 🙂

I showed him one example and then he took over and got the hang of it.

SS Halloween Game I decided to make a printable for this in case you wanted to download it and save it in your files for any teachers, homeschoolers, or for all you organized moms.

As you can see, this halloween printable has other images in case you have different stickers and it has candy corn images in case you want to sort your autumn mix candy instead. We sorted the candy corn and had a blast…. the dog was a little jealous!

He had to color each space the matching color before he could eat each candy corn, and he got a little carried away at the end… maybe it was the sugar high.

Mommy wrote the numbers after he counted each side.

You can also use the other images in this printable to make playing cards for memory or Halloween Go Fish.

If you have younger kids that you would like to do this activity with, you can simply have them sort these items without any of the bells and whistles. For the sticker activity, Just say “Let’s sort the groups of stickers. Can you put ALL of the jack-o-lanterns on this side of the chart under the jack-o-lantern and ALL of the ghosts on this side of the page under the ghost?”

Finally, if you want the download it is just around $1 in my TeachersPayTeachers Store,

OR become a member and get this printable along with ALL of my other printables for just a few dollars more!!

October 24, 2013 by Jessica | 0 comments

Make My Pumpkin

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

IMG_20131021_085735_081 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?!

October 23, 2013 by Casey | 0 comments

Don’t Just Pin it – Do it! Jack-O-Lantern Art

Recently in my mom group we were talking about how we are more likely to pin, than to DO the activities with our kids.

I admitted that this was a tendency of mine too but that I had recently committed to make a habit to plan on DOING at least one activity from my Pinterest boards a day… which may mean that I need to pick one the night before to make sure I have what I need.

The activity I’m going to share today isn’t one that I had on my Pinterest Board “October Activities” but it will be added today because it was always one of my favorite activities in the classroom and I had fun doing this activity with Sean Patrick.

I read this book so I could show the kids a jack-o-lantern and we could talk about the colors, shapes, and function of a jack-o-lantern Clifford's First Halloween

(If you do not participate in halloween you can still make this craft asa Fall pumpkin).

First, I pulled an orange sheet of construction paper, a brown sheet of construction paper, a black sheet of construction paper, a yellow sheet of construction paper, a white crayon, and a glue stick…. these materials can vary (if you don’t have one of those colors then COLOR a white sheet of computer paper (that is what I did for the stem of the pumpkin).

Yellow piece of construction paper not pictured.

Next, I drew a pumpkin shape with my white crayon onto the black construction sheet of paper. I drew triangle eyes, a nose, and a mouth that you can fill in with yellow construction paper or leave blank. Great time to talk about shapes 🙂

Then, together the kids and I tore the orange sheet into lots of pieces, and we used the glue stick to cover the inside of the shape on everything that we wanted to be orange.

And, we covered the pumpkin (or jack-o-lantern when you glue around the facial features).

Finally, we filled in the stem with brown, the facial features with yellow, and hung it up on our playroom blinds with a clothespin to take pride in our Jack-o-lantern! (If I did it again I would start with the yellow facial features then do the orange).

We had fun, we accomplished something together, and they “worked out” their little fingers which is always a great way to prime them for writing.

This craftivity would be best for a four and up child in my personal opinion, but we didn’t finish this in one sitting and mommy helped A LOT!

After sharing one of these pics on my Instagram, a mommy teacher friend of mine took this approach….

And I LOVE LOVE LOVE that she used what she had, she made an activity geared toward her girl’s interests, and she inspired me to do this spin on the activity too! Thanks Allie!

October 21, 2013 by Jessica | 1 Comment