Native American Bead Making and Necklace Making

During the month of November we study Native Americans.  One of the projects we did was bead making. It was rather easy for us after thinking through the activity and making it as easy as possible.  And our final result would be a necklace.

First we got straw pieces and some crayola model magic.  I love that stuff and its a different texture for the children to experience.  I thought it would be easy to mold, quick to dry, and light as I knew we'd make necklaces out of them.

Our first step was to mold the bead.  I showed the children how to make a ball and then put the straw piece through the middle of the ball.  I had to use a sharp pencil to get any leftover dough out of the straw.  We let these dry for several days, although we didn't have to.

Our next step was to put color on the beads.  I thought about many options... paint was on the top of my list... but I wanted them colorful so I opted to use markers to color the beads.  The children loved doing this so it was a success.

Next we strung our necklaces using the beads we made, straw pieces, and some plastic beads I had.  What fun it was trying to come up with a pattern!  Even the younger children had fun with this.  I always tape one end to the table when we string and when they are done I carefully remove the tape and tie the ends together.

And we all were excited to show off our beautiful necklaces we made!

Thanks for stopping by,
Rose

Family Theme

Right before we get into Thanksgiving I like to do something about our families.  Besides all the books and activities we did I thought our "Family Books" turned out really nice.  Here is what we made...

We made the cover with paper piecing and some imagination of how we wanted our house to look.

Our family portraits were fun to make after talking about whose in our family and how

each family can be different.

We all talked of different things families like to do and then each child

picked their favorite that their family likes to do and illustrated it.

We talked about what they eat at home and then each child picked their favorite

food their family likes to eat.

We did a lot with how I help my family and then each child illustrated how 

they like to help their family.

And our final page was to color a heart and glue a family picture to it

that they brought from home.

Hope you enjoyed how we made our family books.

Rose

Space Theme

We spent a few days learning a little about space.  Some of the activities we did were:

We made a rocket ship which I forgot to take a picture of the final project.

We went over some space vocabulary with this from here.

We made toilet tube astronauts and got the pattern from here.

We did two concept worksheets on patterning and same size from here.

We did a number sequence puzzle of the solar system from here.

We also did a cutting activity sheet from here.

 We sequenced the size of the sun, Earth, and moon.

And we made these fun toilet paper tube space shuttles from here.

Thanks for stopping by,

Rose

"Itsy Bitsy Spider"

I am taking this cognition class they are offering in my area and we had homework.  Our assignment was for the children in our care to "act out" a familiar story.  Thank you to Deborah Stewart and her blog (which you can see here) it simplified what I was going to do.

I took the book "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" and decided to use it for my assignment and see how things would go.  Of course, this had to be child-driven so I really didn't have a "plan" ready of exactly how we should accomplish the task.

Before I read the book, to show the familiarity of the story, I had my preschoolers sing the song.

We decided to just do the first verse of the story which is the regular version of "The Itsy Bitsy Spider".  Once we decided on the verse we had to come up with the role each child would take and we used the marker board to list the roles and who would do each part.  The children got all the parts except the waterspout so with some prompting they figured out we needed a waterspout.

Each child needed to make a prop for their role using what ever they wanted to (can you tell do-a-dot markers are a fav around here)...

The Sun

 The Rain

 The Spider

 The Waterspout

They decided how to put the play together and the final production looked like this...

Well we had so much fun doing this that they wanted to do another one... so we picked the second verse in the book and worked it out similar to the way we did it above.  

We decided on the characters (or items) we needed using the marker board.  This time they got all of the characters, including the kitchen wall.

This time they were in such a hurry to "act it out" that they spent very little time and hardly any materials to make their prop.

The Spider

The Fan

The Wind

Interestingly enough they picked the wall where our play kitchen is to do the whole production.  They did have me sing to help them since they didn't know the verse very well.

Here is the final production...

You can view my powerpoint for the class to see more details of the assignment.

Thanks for stopping by...

Rose

"Humpty Dumpty"

As my little ones would say... "You told a fib!"  Yes... time seems to escape me and this blog (which I actually love doing so much) seems to be on that list of things I never get to.  With that said, I think I'm just going to try to post "something" we do vs. a whole week of activities.  Flashing pictures is just so hard with this particular group and I "love" looking at pictures as they speak to me more than the words most of the time.

So here is a few of our "Humpty Dumpty" activities...

A long time ago I purchased "High Reach" curriculum... the time before I had a computer... telling how old I must be...ha, ha... so I used there wonderful teaching tool to go with "Humpty Dumpty".

Once the children knew the rhyme we acted out the rhyme by pretending to sit on a wall (a wall of piled pillows) and then of course falling off.

We sequenced the rhyme to help us remember the rhyme using this.  We also talked about what sequencing is and the kind of words we use when we sequence (first, next, last).

And of course we had to do some art work...

So we made this which I got the idea from here.

And we water-painted this which I got from here.

Which made a nice little bulletin board display in our daycare room.

Thanks for stopping by...
Rose