get one.
add a duct tape strap if too many rock start moves are happening, nearly breaking the instrument.
u is for ukulele
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Tag Archives: u
u is for under
one year i might get brave enough to do something with u is for underwear, but until then i will stop at under.
you get the idea.
i suspended a piece of fabric across two shelves and used good old duct tape.
this provided a long stretch for children to crawl (or walk) under
since all our work was offered as “under the table” work, i took the chairs away for the week. this meant finding new places to eat snack!
no problem!
u is for umbrella
let me begin this post expressing gratitude that no. eyes. were. poked. out. ahhhhhh.
we drew ourselves under umbrellas (a great chance to see self-portrait work).
we played games under my big umbrella.
this is a basic find the item hidden in an egg, match it to the photcopied picture. some kids were shaking the eggs first to try to figure out which item it was.
we move into the hallway when we want hard floor or more space to work on.
or when we want to put on all our rainy weather gear for a fashion show.
p is for puddle
we were given hundreds of HUGE coffee filters a few years ago. i fear we may finish them up this year. we used them with colored water (food coloring and liquid watercolors) and pipettes.
when they dried, we added the text strip: “here is my puddle, oh what a muddle.” the kids loved saying this as we looked through the completed projects.
with some of the extra rain puddles, we cut out letter U for our journals.
we did brainstorming (ha!) of what can happen in a storm. i imitated the sirens that go off every week in town (for testing or for severe weather). that was a funny time, alright. then we took the completed list to the colored water table and let it “rainbow rain” all over it!
with more of the extra rain puddles, we cut out flower shapes to adorn the classroom and hallway.
beautiful!
b is for band
friday morning jam session using real instruments: ukulele, accordian and hands
q is for q hands
when i had a circle of preschoolers who needed a little “wowing.” the moments when someone simply stands up and walks away, when two others whimper like dogs and i realize they’ve not stopped their work time game, when the few that were sitting on their little piece of tape are now looking bored, when there is a full volume conversation about halloween costumes (from nearly 4 months ago)…get the image?
the circle time focus for the day was that U usually follows Q. i decided to quickly write a Q on one hand a U on the other. then sing the the letters Q, U, Q, U, Q, U, Q, U while opening my hands for the correct letter.
i got them all back! yes.
m is for milk lid
preschool families and friends have been collecting milk lids for us.
thank you!
since it is m week we’ve been sorting by color. we’ve noticed that in the tens of milk lids there are, there is only one brown lid. come on, let’s drink some chocolate milk!
the next phase of this activity is arranging them into words, letter groups, abc order, etc. for some of our kids we explored spacing between letters. learning that when there is a “finger space” between letters that means they are different words. sometimes it was fun to do that on purpose. like a joke. hee hee hee.
we noticed how many letters can become other letters simply by turning them.
kevin can become keviz and can easily become kevin again! more funny stuff.
keep bringing those milk lids…we have more projects in mind!
v is for vowel
we took advantage of i week to talk about the concept of vowels. we sang this song (to the tune of “bingo”):
then i had each vowel written on a piece of paper and when i took one (or more) away, we clapped in its place.
these preschoolers got pretty good by the end of the week! and they liked knowing that they were talking about something that big kids still talk about. : )
l is for letter
i dabble in the handwriting without tears curriculum. mostly i am fascinated by the desire to make letter writing easily successful for children. one thing we do that is handwriting-withou- tears-ish is give craft sticks or wide gross grain ribbon strips to form the letters. here we have a 5 stick capital E:
r is for rice bottles
my kids were glad to help drink 26 bottles of gatorade and vitamin water so i could have wider-mouth bottles.
the preschoolers help me fill bottles with rice and then i hide something inside correlated to a letter. i tape the lid on with colored duct tape and write the letter on the lid.
so far there is one little apple hidden in the A bottle
a plastic baby, a bird and a button hidden in the B bottle
plastic cows hidden in the C bottle
dice hidden in the D bottle
an egg and an elephant hidden in the E bottle
i’m thinking feathers in the F bottle, blades of grass in the G bottle, horses in the H bottle, ivy in the I bottle, jacks in the J bottle…on and on.
a little guy told me today that the A bottle was his favorite thing at preschool. wow.
