A Peek at our Week!

Well, it is definitely raining! It has been absolutely pouring all morning, just about the heaviest rain that I have ever seen, and just when I think it's clearing it sets in again.  Time for me share a few photos of some of the activities we had fun with during group work this week!

Let's start with fine motor morning groups.

Using pieces of pipe cleaner as worms and clothes pegs as bird beaks is a very easy way to work on developing those little hand muscles and fine motor control.  Just cut up the pipe cleaners and provide some sort of container to work as a nest.  Kidlets use their bird beak to grab a worm and transfer it to their nest.  It would be very easy to make this activity much cuter, but my kidlets have always bought into the bird idea so I just leave it as it. :)

We love feeding Mike! You can find out how to make him in this post.

Kidlets squeeze open his mouth and feed him beans - or anything you have. This activity is quite tricky for some little ones during the beginning of the year, but as we work on muscle strength and stamina it becomes much easier.  Strong muscles mean no more "I can't write anymore, my hand is sore!" after only a few words on the page and much better pencil control. :)

Felt chains - the perfect quiet activity. :) Find out how I made them in this post.

We had lots of fun during literacy groups this week, but being with my Guided Reading group makes it very tricky to take photos!

I did manage to get a few snaps of this group playing Tower of Power!

This version is the letter recognition one - just write letters on plastic cups.  Kidlets take turns choosing one from the top of the stack, saying the letter and adding their cup to the tower.  We also play this with sight words later in the term.  The perfect storage solution for this game is an empty Pringles container!

These gorgeous girls aren't in my class this year but they came to visit one afternoon and played a game of 'Up, Up and Away'. This was the letter recognition game we played at the end of Guided Reading this week.

My kidlets love this game because of the superhero theme - and the sound effects they can make along the way! :) It's in my store in both Queensland font and standard font.

This week was our first practice with 'Write the Room'!  I love these activities because they make even the most simple concepts so much more exciting!

All you need are some clipboards.  This week I made up some picture cards and kidlets had to write down the number shown on each.  They loved sneaking around as 'spies' to find the cards.  You can find heaps and heaps of Count the Room/Write the Room packs on TpT.

A little more counting practice with some numeral and number recognition thrown in.  Kidlets loved counting buttons onto their snowman to match his knitted hat.  This part of a freebie in my store. :)

Lucky last... 

This activity is super simple to make.  Just use some masking tape to label pipe cleaners with numbers.  Kidlets lace the correct amount of beads onto each one.  

Turns out I took more photos this week than I thought. I'm trying really hard to make sure they are good ones, but you know how it is in the classroom!  I don't want to stop kidlets as they are working, and Preppies sure are wriggly.  Hopefully you found an idea or two you might be able to use. :)

Fine Motor Fun... with a FREEBIE!

Hello lovely friends!  I wanted to pop in very quickly to share a few new resources that I'm planning to use this year.  Everyone knows teachers need to make the most of every minute in the classroom, so the bonus is that both of these tasks integrate fine motor skills with literacy and math concepts. Double bonus? One of them is a freebie!

First up is an addition to my Link-It-Up! series of products, this time with a focus on word families.  Simply add plastic chain links, pipe cleaners or laces to the cards and you've got a perfect Literacy Center or fast finisher activity that's easy to differentiate.  Choose pictures only...

...pictures with words...

... or words only.

Or of course, you could use a few of each!

These photos are from the 'Short A' pack, but of course there's 'Short E', 'Short I', 'Short O' and 'Short U' families as well.  You can also grab them all in a BUNDLE!

Just this morning I uploaded a cute counting (1-10) freebie to my store.  I'm so excited for my kidlets to use these, I know they'll love the cute snowmen and scooping 'marshmallows' onto hot chocolate!  It will be perfect to practise counting as well as numeral and number word recognition.

Click on the image below to check out this resource:

I hope wherever you are that you're having a wonderful day. Thanks for stopping by! :)

Two Craft Projects for a Cheap 'n' Cheerful Christmas!

Can you believe that as of today it's only one month til Christmas?  My kidlets only have five more full days of school left for the year, so we are spending this week working on a heap of cheap 'n' cheerful holiday themed learning, mixed in with a little art and craft.  It's always great to do some special end of year activities, but it can be really expensive to buy a lot of bits and bobs to prepare them all.  This week, I'm going to share with you some easy ideas that won't break the bank. I had good intentions of posting about the super fun Maths and Literacy activities we did today... but... well... it's Monday night and I'm tired.  So instead, here's two craft projects that my kidlets worked on last Friday and today.

First up, the easiest wreath you will ever make:

All you need is a paper plate with the middle cut out per child.  I bought a pack of 100 plates for a couple of dollars at a discount store.  Then, have your kidlets cut green crepe paper into small squares to collage onto it.  Add some red squares for berries (you could easily punch out some red paper circles - but I like the abstract look because I am lazy), and a paper bow.  Easy peasy!  And they look really great on display in the classroom - although my kidlets are begging me to take them home for their front doors. :)

The next idea is a little bit trickier but so effective.  You'll need a few things ready:

Grab some felt sheets to cut a carrot nose and scarf for each child.  You'll also need black top hats - I guess you could use felt for this as well, but I forgot about the hats until this morning so I used card.  The felt sheets were 90c each, and I only needed 1 orange sheet, and 2 green sheets.  The card was scraps from another project, but I used less than 1/4 of a piece.  The buttons were in a craft pack - I think they were about $5 but the bag is HUGE! There's literally hundreds left.  I'm sure you could buy a smaller pack for much less money, or you might have a stash of buttons in your storeroom. :)  You'll need 3 buttons per child.  They don't all need to be the same colour - in fact it would probably be cuter with a variety of colours.  Stick 'em all onto a jumbo craft stick ($2 for a pack of 25) and you get these cuties:

(Ours still need a little piece of ribbon glued on so you can hang them on a tree.)

*The pin that gave me the inspiration for this led to a site that was blocked for spam... so I'm not sure who originally had this idea.*

I did this step by step, but my Preppies made these by themselves.  Older kids could cut their pieces out themselves, too - it's really very easy.

Hopefully one (or both!) of these ideas might be something that you can use with your kidlets this year. I'll be back tomorrow (or later in the week... or on Saturday!) with some maths and literacy ideas that will fit with the Christmas theme. 

Until then, let's all have a wonderful week! :)

Lauren