Chicka Chicka Boom Boom {Virtual Book Club}

This month for the Virtual Book Club we read books by Bill Martin Jr. With the start of our school year I did a little bit of research to find a book that would work with what we are already learning.

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom is a fun book to read. We have read through the book several times. The book that I bought also has a CD with Ray Charles preforming the story. The kids love to listen to him tell the story, too. We listened to the CD version several times.

This year for Little Man (pre-k) we will be focusing on new letters each week. Here are a few letter inspired activities that we have done.

Puffy Paint Letter Tracing 
(to make homemade puffy paint, click here.)
I printed off some outlined lowercase letters for Little Man to trace or decorate with puffy paint. He starts tracing the letters and then fills the page with paint. Not a picture I can display but it is fun for him none the less.

Magnet Coconut Tree
I made my own coconut tree with construction paper, laminated it, and then added magnets. I have a huge magnetic oil pan I purchased from Wal-Mart. I pulled out our lowercase magnet letters and had Little Man decorate our tree. I left the tree and letter up on our board for several days and both kids have come by retelling the story on their own.

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Blessings,

Elizabeth

**This post is a part of the Bill Martin, Jr. Virtual Book Club. You can see more fun here.

October Virtual Book Club- Amy Krouse Rosenthal

For the month of October the Virtual Book Club for kids is reading books by Amy Krouse Rosenthal.

We chose the book This Plus That.

For our first activity we mixed different paint colors to make new paint colors. Red + Yellow = Orange, Yellow + Blue = Green, etc. The kids had a great time playing with paint. After our pictures dried we were able to see the mixtures better. I let the kids decide which colors they wanted to mix together. 

After reading the book a couple of times I asked Miss E (5) to give me her own equations. I started off by asking her what she thought of when I said different words. Here is what she came up with:

running + playing = fun

friends + road = play

rain + jumping = fun in puddles

hugs + kisses + "I love you" = family

food + bed = home

The last activity we did with This Plus That was to make oobleck. I got some of the idea from my good friend, Allison, over at Train Up A Child. 

equal parts (cornstarch + water) = oobleck
water + foodcoloring + freezer = colored ice
cornstarch + colored ice = fun

I've never made oobleck before. I knew that I needed equal parts cornstarch and water. I did not make it to the grocery store before we did our activity and I ran short on the cornstarch. The kids had fun anyway. I put some cornstarch into my plastic container and then we added the ice cubes. The kids moved the ice cubes around to noticed the different colors. Once the ice started to melt they were fascinated with the swirls of the different colors. 

Blessings,
Elizanbeth

Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert

My friend, Allison, from Train Up A Child Learn As We Go, posted about a virtual Book Club that she was participating in. I was curious, checked it out, and have decided that we are going to join in the fun. We'll see how I do with the Blog Hop part of the process, but doing activities centered around a book/author sounds like a lot of fun to me.

This month the featured author is Lois Ehlert. We chose Planting A Rainbow as our book. I brought the book home from the library not even thinking about what our week was going to look like. I thought I would just 'add it on' to our unit, turned out that this little book fit PERFECTLY with our science unit. I love it when things come together this way.

We read our book and talked about the flowers and colors as we read.

Our first project was to paint our rainbow garden. I gave the kids a couple pieces of green paper that they could cut and paste as stems for their flowers. 

Then I had the kids paint the flowers.

They had full creative freedom.

 

One of the projects from our core curriculum, Epi Kardia, was to paint terra cotta pots. I enjoyed watching how each kids paints differently. One 'dabbed' the paint and the other 'stroked' the paint onto the pot.

 I already had the idea that we would paint with fruit this week. The kids LOVED using the fruit. At first they were very skeptical, but when they picked up the fruit and saw the different patterns they were fascinated. I used an apple, lemon, lime, orange, and grape as our fruit stamps.

 

We used our newly painted terra cotta pots to plant a few seeds. We talked through each step of planting and growing flowers as we planted our seeds. The kids are excited to watch the flowers grow.

We planted Violas.

I googled the life-cycle of plants and found a picture that I liked. I made the template for for the order, but I had the kids paste the pictures as they thought they should go. Miss E did a great job with putting her flowers in order, starting from #1. Little man got the correct order, he just started in a different spot.

There you have it, the fun we had with Planting A Rainbow.
Elizabeth