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!

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:

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.

this is a great example of when the process is more important than the product…though the product was spectacular.  instead of trying to “make a flower” or “make a cloud” we focused on using as much paint as we wanted…most preschoolers had the clear goal of no white showing.

we could also make these different shades of yellow, egg shape, shamrock shape, leaf shape, heart shape, apple shape, dinosaur shape, beach ball shape, umbrella shape, the landscape for a paper zebra to be glued on to, pumpkin shape, a bunch of grapes shape, igloo shape, jewel shape, kite shape, nut shape, octagon shape, violet shape, whale shape, x shape, money shape, quilt block shape, tree top shape, rain drop shape, etc. : )

we used industrial-size coffee filters (and i mean industrial:  these things are at least 18″ in diameter) cut in cloud/flower shape, folded 4 times in pie fashion, then used plastic pipettes and food coloring containers to drop liquid watercolor paint.

oh, the excitement would brew as a preschoolers suspected they put enough paint on to have no white showing when they unfolded it…and if not, we could easily refold and add more paint.

these were sopping wet, but dried easily when we draped them over chairs, gates, etc.

i buy these large cardboard alphabet shapes each year. then as we work our way through, we coopratively glue things on to represent that letter. here we have egg shells glued on the e.

other favorites i can remember:

apple seeds on a

buttons on b

crayon chunks on c

dirt on d

fake fur on f

grass on g

hair on h

ice cube painting on i

jewels on j

ketchup packets on k

lint (from the dryer) on l

(fake) money on m

nut shells on n

oatmeal on o

purple paint on p

q-tips on q

ribbon on r

sand on s

tape on t

(paper drink) umbrellas on u

velvet on v

wipes on w

x-rays on x

yellow yarn on y

zippers on z