Five for Friday {Easter Edition}

Hello y'all! I know I've been MIA for some time. I am just enjoying being a stay at home mom while I can. We've been busy playing outside, working on house projects {which are never-ending}, finishing our first soccer season, and other fun things. I just had to link up this week to show y'all some of our Easter fun! 

{one}

I picked up these cute, little, glittery eggs at The Dollar Tree. I wasn't sure what we would do with them, but I knew we could use them at home and that I could hopefully use them in the classroom when I go back.

We sorted by color and used them as manipulatives for another activity. 

{two}

Number-Dot Activity - I wrote numbers on one half of the egg and made that number of dots on the other half. We mixed them all up, sorted them into eggs with dots and eggs with numbers. E had fun matching them.

{three}

Easter Egg Addition - On another set of Easter eggs, I wrote simple addition sentences on half of the egg and the answers on the other side. This is where those cute, glittery eggs came in handy as manipulatives. E did so well with this activity! 

{four}

Easter Egg Jump - This activity involved lots of movement, which is always good! I did this activity too and wore my Polar FT4 watch to see how many calories I burned, which was 47 calories {although it felt like it should've been a lot more}. I wrote numbers on pieces of foam {you could use paper or any material you can write on}. When E picked an egg, he read the number aloud and we jumped that many times. I did numbers 1-12. So, we jumped 78 times. Then, we started all over and did the same activity, but with jumping jacks. It was a really FUN activity and E really enjoyed it!

{five}

Sadly, I don't have a picture for this but I wanted to share how I used Easter eggs in my fourth grade classroom. I love using seasonal manipultives and you can use them no matter what age you teach. In my fourth grade class, my partner teacher and I wrote down Math problems and put one in each egg. When the student got an egg, they solved the problem and then got a piece of candy if their answer was right. If it wasn't, we'd talk about where they went wrong and they were encouraged to try again and if they needed assistance, they could ask a classmate for help. It was a fun way to have some Easter fun while using standards! 

Happy Easter, friends! 

Letter Bb - BEARS

Last week we finished our letter Bb for bears! I found these letter Bb puzzles online. They were good to see how the letter Bb is formed.

I also really liked this bear coloring page. For a non-reader, it was easy to see what color the bear should be - except for white and grey. Of course, the word "white" couldn't be in the color white since you wouldn't be able to see it. That confused E - the color it was written in was gray so naturally, he thought that two bears were supposed to be gray.

Even though this printable from Confessions of a Homeschooler uses butterfly for the letter Bb, we still used it to find letter Bb's.

We also worked on some basic bear addition! Note to self - work on writing numbers ... I had to help him with all of these.

Our last activity was too difficult so we made our own rules! At first, I called out #s for E to put a dot on. He got frustrated easily because there were lots of numbers he didn't know (20+). So we took turns calling out #s that he knew and then just put dots on the rest!

Letter Bb - BEARS!

Since I became a SAHM, I decided I would let E pick out our topics and not go in ABC order, but just do whatever "theme" each week that he wanted to do! So far, we have learned about:

Ee - elephant

Gg - giraffe

Ll - lion

Dd - dog

Vv - Valentine's

Aa - ant

Bb - bear

Last week we learned about Aa for ants and this week are continuing our learning of Bb for bears. E realized these two were in ABC order and now he says we HAVE to go in ABC order! He's all about having things in order, matching, or sorted correctly so I'm not too surprised. I told him we can go in ANY order and it doesn't matter if it's ABC, but he's set on going in ABC order so next week, the letter C it is!

Anyway, let's look at some more of our Letter Bb fun.  I ordered counting bears on Amazon and E has LOVED playing with them!

We used Do-a-Dot markers to mark the letter Bb on this chart! He did great with this activity.

We used the counting bears to play the game "Help the Bear get to his Cave". We each picked a bear and rolled the dice. The goal was to get to your bear to the cave first. E may or may not have had a complete meltdown when my bear got their first. Oops. He won one round, too!

We also used counting bears to add bears to the cave. Super simple - just roll the dice and add that number of bears to the cave.

One of our favorite activity was working with gummy bears!! First, we did this Great Gummy Bear Sort, which was SUPER cute and fun! Then, we graphed our gummy bears and talked about which one we had the most of, the least of, etc.

We also did a bear alphabet recognition activity where I would call out a letter and E would color the bear with that letter. What a great way to assess alphabet recognition. 

We also practiced tracing the letter Bb!

Letter Aa - ANTS {Five for Friday}

This week I have posted all about our Letter Aa for ANTS fun we have been having! If you missed my first two posts, you can click here and here. Today we have wrapped up our ANT fun!

I created this Bugs in the Grass activity after seeing an awesome post on Teach Preschool Facebook page. They linked back to a blog called Share and Remember, where this activity comes from! Hers looks a lot better with more realistic grass and little colored bins to sort the bugs. But, I am happy how mine turned out considering I threw it together in minutes!

I love how she had colored cups that they used to sort the bugs with!

{TWO}

We continued to practice the letter A and colored an ant, while talking about the parts of the ant!

{THREE}

We made the letter Aa using pattern blocks! We love using patterns blocks for all sorts of things. I wish more moms knew how easy these are and how much fun kids have playing with them. I purchased these on Amazon a long time ago and they are perfect! We'll even be able to use them when E studies fractions a long time from now!

{FOUR}

We went on a letter Aa hunt with this ant passage! E really likes to do this activity.

{FIVE}

E was not a fan of this activity because it posed some difficulty, but I loved it! These ant counting cards reinforce counting objects, matching them to a number, AND fine motor skills by having children use clothespins with numbers on them to show how many ants there are! E has trouble with clothespins and gets frustrated easily with them.

Earlier I mentioned that I wish more parents knew how easy it is to incorporate "school" things at home and you don't have to spend a lot of money to do so!  I hope to post a list of things parents can do at home to help their children one day! BUT, today I wanted to share these shape puzzles....

I picked these up at the Dollar General for only $1.00! I loved that the are puzzles, they have lots of different shapes (we've never talked about trapezoids before!), they show real life objects that are that shape, AND they were only $1.00!

Happy Friday, y'all! 

Valentine's Day Activities - Post #3

I hope you all had a fun Valentine's Day! We had the best time doing Valentine's Day activities all week. Today I am wrapping up our Valentine's Day activities with post #3. If you missed my earlier posts, just click for Post #1 and Post #2. 

Earlier in the week we sorted candy hearts by color and counted them and we also put them in coordinating colored hearts. Our last candy heart activity was to identify the first letter of the first word and sort them that way!

We practiced writing the letter V, with a heart no less, to keep the Valentine's spirit alive!

I cut out hearts and E sorted them by size and glued them down on this chart.

We put numbers in order and matched the cards that had the same number of dots.

We went on a letter V hunt! E highlighted all of the letter V's in this Valentine's passage.

We had SO much fun doing all of these holiday themed activities! I am already looking forward to St. Patrick's Day! In the meantime we will go back to doing animal themed weeks!

Valentine's Day Activities - Post #2

This is my second post of Valentine's Day activities for Preschool or younger elementary. If you missed my first post, you can view it here. 

I drew hearts in different colors on a piece of paper and let E organize them by color. Both packages that we've used of candy hearts had a lot more blue than other colors in them.

E made a pattern - green, orange, pink - on the letter V.

E sorted hearts by color.

We worked on this shape tracer - we need a little more work on it. :) 

We counted sets of hearts. I laminated these sheets and we used dry erase markers so we could erase when we finished.

We sorted pom poms by color and then put them in an ice tray using tweezers.

We lined up letters of the alphabet and matched upper and lower case letters. 

I'll have a third post coming up soon!

Five for Friday {Giraffe}

I am linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday. This week we have enjoyed fun in the snow (see last post) and we have learned about the letter G for giraffe!

{one} 

We made a fun giraffe craft with Cheerio's. I love how it turned out!

{two}

We worked on fine motor activities. 

{three}

We played with beans and Play-Dough.

{four}

We made the letter G with pattern blocks and read giraffe books.

{five}

Tomorrow we are picking up Maggie and Molly, our miniature schnauzers! We are super excited!