Sunday, February 27, 2011

Happy Birthday Dr. Suess!!


March 2nd is Dr. Suess's birthday!  It makes for a fun week at preschool!  I just wanted to share some great sights, full of great Dr. Suess themed ideas!

obSEUSSedButton

Click on the above link to visit ObSEUSSed!  This girl defiently loves her Cat in The Hat!

Visit Oopsey Daisy for a ton of fun party ideas and activities.  These could easily be adapted to a classroom setting.  She also has a fun Dr. Suess Matching game available for a free download!

Fun in First Grade has a bunch of ideas!  These are geared to twoards 1st grad and above, but I was able to get some inspiration and find a few ideas that I could make work for my kiddo's.

2 Teaching Mommies has this huge unit full of fun ideas!
Counting and pattern cards by Our Little Monkeys.

Visit A to Z teacher stuff for loads of ideas. 
Available for all grade levels.
Early moments has some great coloring pages.
Erica Bohrer's First Grade has a great page full of links.
One Extra Degree, has some fun links & ideas!
Oh and visit Seussville
Lot's of goodies available here!
If you know of other sights, please share! 

Friday, February 25, 2011

Yummy or Yucky

This is perhaps my favorite day of preschool!
We provide the kids a variety of food and let them taste
it and see if it's yummy or yucky!
This guy gave us some great faces!
Apparently limes are yucky!
This girlie loved everything we gave her.
Every single thing, she did last year to.
He was our only spitter!  It was the cooking chocolate.

We just had a piece of paper that we divided in to two columns.  One side said Yummy and the other said Yucky.  Add some cute clip art and wala, cute, cute take home sheet. I wish I had a scanner, I would scan it for you, but I don't, sorry.  Then we had pictures of the foods that we gave to the kids.  They were color copies that we had pre-cut so that they could just glue them on. 

This is a huge project. It takes a lot of prep on the teachers part and it is time consuming the day of, but so worth it!

Here is the foods that we had for them to try:

Tootsie rolls, marshmallows, pretzel, peanut butter and cheese crackers, salt and vinegar chips, regular potato chips, popcorn, sugar cubes, lemons, limes, bitter chocolate, goldfish, jelly beans, popcorn, pickles, apples, oranges, almonds, Hershey's bar, red licorice and back licorice.  The possibilities are of course endless, but have fun with it.  It is one of the funnest days. 

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Popcorn Popping

 We have been working on 5 senses.  It's my very favorite week of the year!  That and superhero week!  I thought I would share this first, because you could use it with P week or with 5 senses. 
Popcorn is great to use during 5 senses week because you can use all 5 senses to experience popcorn.  I brought an air popper into the class and had the kids help me make the popcorn.  You can hear it bouncing around in the popper, you can smell it, you can see it, you can touch it and the best part - you can taste it!

We used plain popcorn to apply to our "apricot" tree's.  I got the template off of Scholastic. You need to have a membership to print from that sight, but it's totally worth getting one if you teach or home school.
We use our painter's pallet to put a little white glue in.  Then we give the kids a q-tip to spread the glue.  We do this weekly in preschool and the kids love it.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Q is for Quilt

I don't have a reference for the page that we used.  It came from a book, but it was originally used to make patters.  I just took some fabric, cut it up and had the kids made quilts.  We just used white glue to adhere it to the page.
Can't get blogger to take this picrue if it's not flipped this way :(, but super easy and super cute! You can find the printable, here.
You can find this page, here.  We also did a cute little emergent reader, which can be found here.

Friday, February 18, 2011

O is for Owl

So cute!  We decided that using the small O's on the eye's would be our O's on the page.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

P is for Pirate

How cute is she?  To get the template go to Cottage Industrialist, this page is full of fun pirate printables!  Perfect for birthday parties or preschool pirate days! 

We also had a treasure hunt, which we had to modify to be indoors thanks to 60 mph winds!  It was fun though, the kids loved it.  We also made cute pirates out of the letter P, but that's a post for another day!

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

N is for......

I am so glad Shelley has a cricuit.  It makes life so much easier!  We used floral grass for the nest and the kids just glued it and the bird to the letter N. 

Super easy and super cute!

Sunday, February 13, 2011

P is for Penguin

The kids loved this! Simply glue goldfish onto the penguins bellies!  I got the template from Lakeshore learning and blew it up to the size we needed.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Valentine's Headbands

This is seriously the easiest craft ever. It is great to do for school party's or just because. We did these with my Kindergartner's class 2 years ago and have done it every year since.

Grab some poster board and cut headbands. Make sure you cut it the long way, or you might end up with to short of headbands. Especially if your kiddo has a big head, which mine does!! That was a lesson I learned the hard way.
Let the kiddo's decorate them any way they want. You can have them color them, glue glitter to them, or we used foam letter stickers to spell out their names. Glue the headbands together. Twist your pipe cleaners around a pen, attach 2 foam hearts or flowers back to back. Stapel the pipe cleaners to the inside of the headband. And now you have  cute Valentine Day headbands.

***This is also a repost from last year.  We will also be making these for our preschool party.  We are using fun cupcake picks, that we found at the dollar store.  We popped the glittery styrofoam hearts off the the sticks and hot glued them and then stuck them on a pipe cleaner.  Super cute!!

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Valentine's Day Shades


This was not as easy as I thought it would be. I'd say at least a 1st grade level. Not any younger than that or you will be cutting out every single pair. The older kids did fine, it was the younger one's who had me wishing I hadn't attempted it. Although, I had 3 additional kids. So in a small group this would probably not be to bad. This is a great idea for classroom parties. You'll want to print the template on card stock. The only thing I had to pick up was the red cellophane. And I got that at the dollar store. Cheap, Easy and Fun!!

I got the template for these glasses, here. They also have templates for rounded glasses and star glasses, which would be fun to make and decorate for any occasion. the stars would be awesome for the 4th of July!
***This is a repost from last year.  We are using these in preschool for our party next week.  However, I had a YW, who was looking for service hours and she cut out all 20 pairs!  Megan, I LOVE YOU!!  The kids are going to love them!

Friday, February 4, 2011

O for Octopus

 The kids loved this!  Some of them were so meticulous about putting the cheerios on and others, well they are three!!!  You can find this at Making Learning Fun.
This cute little octopus windsock is great for practicing cutting skills.  You can find it First School.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

O is for Ocean...

This was a really fun craft to do.  Originally I was going to have the kids paint a plate blue, but I found these buried in our supplies.  I had the kids pick out stickers and put those on first.  I did draw a line on the plate to show them the ocean verses the sand.  To make the sand I added 3 parts shaving cream to 1 part white glue and then I added real sand and just kept adding it until I got the consistency that I wanted.  It was really thick, but it dried up nice and puffy. Add a few sea shells and you have a nice little beach picture to hang on your wall!