Bugs!

Dramatic Play

The first two days, we played in ant tunnels.  I also had butterfly and ladybug headbands for them to play with.



The second two days, we played the butterfly life cycle. I truthfully wasn't sure if they'd get it, but thought of it as my kids were playing in sleeping bags one time and looked like caterpillars. They got it and loved it! I was so impressed! They loved wiggling around, then going in their chrysalis, and shedding their skin to become a butterfly. Some even were ladybug larva, then a pupa, then a ladybug. My teacher heart sang :)


 

Blocks

Dramatic Play extended over, but this also became our science bug center for our live bugs. Look how tiny the caterpillars started!!
 



 
There were also bug games and puzzles available for them to play, and they did them all.

Art

Bug sponge stamping. I added some plants too.
 
We did snack prep to make ladybug pizzas. Then painted.

We made egg carton bugs.
 
Looked at live ladybugs! I bought a bag of 1500 at Smith's, and was super disappointed that 75% were dead :(  But the live ones were fun to watch and release.

Small Manipulatives

Pattern puzzle magnets with bug patterns

Insect Dominos

File Folder Games (thanks to my son's awesome church teacher)

Bee Counting Game (thanks to that same teacher)

Bug Size Sorting (again, amazing primary teacher)

Ladybug ABC puzzle
 
The Hungry Caterpillar story board and puzzle
 
Writing
 We had bug stamp markers
 
and bug tracing/coloring pages 
 
Snack

Our bug-specific snacks were the lady bug pizzas.
 
And caterpillar kabobs, which they made by putting grapes and blueberries on their skewers. They were delicious, healthy, and a great fine motor activity!

 Outside

We had bugs in the sensory table with wheat.

I also had jars for bug catching. We looked underneath things in my yard and found lots of worms, centipedes, spiders, and earwigs. We also had fun chasing and trying to catch baby grasshoppers! They're fast little guys, and we did manage to catch 2.

 

Large Group
We learned the word Life Cycle, and used the bug models I had to learn about the life cycles of Butterflies, Ladybugs, and Praying Mantises. Then, they got in groups of 3 and took turns with the models and put them all in order.

We made caterpillars by gluing pom poms on clothespins. They will transform later.
 
We took a field trip to my neighbor's beehive. She forgot and wasn't home, but we still got to see the hive and bees, touch real wax from the bees, and see one of the boards they had built their honeycomb on. We also saw many bugs on our walk.

We read The Hungry Caterpillar, then painted a coffee filter with watercolors for our butterflies. Once they dried, our caterpillars transformed into butterflies!

We wrote in our journals about our favorite bugs we learned about.

Each day, we sang Head Thorax Abdomen to learned about insects. It's to the tune of Head Shoulders Knees and Toes.

Head, thorax, abdomen. Abdomen. Abdomen.
Head, thorax, abdomen. 6 legs and antennae.


Small Group
Miss Kim worked on math. They did the bug 1-10 puzzles, then sorted bugs by size.

My group did math too, using a bug measuring book I have. It has an attached measuring tape, so we read the book and took turns measuring the bugs on each page.

Week 2, Miss Kim played The Hungry Caterpillar board game with her group.

My group reviewed patterns and made caterpillar necklaces with green penne pasta and red pony beads.

Colors

Parents, sorry I have not stayed as caught up on the blog as I should! The goal is to post the weekend after the theme, but life has been too crazy to get to it. I am caught up now, and should hopefully stay that way now! 3 kids are crazy, plus my husband works from home on our computer, so I have to wait until night, when we're much busier. That problem has now been solved, and I should stay more caught up. Thanks for your patience!

Dramatic Play



Paint Store. Thanks to all of our painting projects this year with the bathroom remodel, and building the play house, I had lots of empty paint cans for the store. Lots of brushes and stir sticks too. The color samples were gathered from Lowes and Home Depot, then I just added the cash register and shopping carts.

As usual, the cash register was a hit, and they spent a lot of time shopping for blocks and scanning the legos on the belt. I guess the paint cans were just too big!

The paint supplies were a hit all on their own. While I did see kids buying paint, they just loved taking the cans and brushes all over the room to paint the walls and furniture. It was a lot of fun.

Blocks (I forgot to take pics)

Week 1, we had out waffle blocks. These are new, donated by a sweet neighbor, and are a huge hit! They can build tracks and roads easily, and they loved that.

Week 2, we had out Duplo legos, then the foam blocks.

Art
Day 1, we simply painted with primary color paint, so they could start exploring with mixing colors.

Day 2, we used colored beads to make necklaces and bracelets.

Day 3, we had tubs full of baking soda, and bottles of red, yellow, and blue colored vinegar. This is more sensory than art, and they loved it! They not only got to experiment with mixing colors, but they got to watch it fizz and bubble too. They were so great at sharing, as well. Each kid got one tub and could use it until their vinegar was gone, then they let someone else have their seat while they played something else.


















Once everyone was done, we used the art table to make their painted toast for snack. I colored some milk red, yellow, and blue, and they used pastry brushes to brush it onto bread, then we toasted it.

Day 4, we did Jello art. They had glue and shakers full of different colors and flavors of Jello to sprinkle on. They had a lot of fun with this too and I had a huge stack of pictures afterwards! It was messy, but the room smelled so good for days! Way better than the vinegar day :)

 

Small Manipulatives

Paint chip cards with matching clothespins

Folder games

Rainbow cards with pom poms and tweezers

Color puzzles










 

Colored horses with matching clothespin legs















Color Dinosaurs


Snack

Our color-specific snacks were colored goldfish that we sorted before we ate them, and the painted toast.

Sensory Table
Days 1 and 4, I had bottles of primary colored water that they could mix in clear tubs. This was a huge hit both days, and I loved seeing all the color combinations they created!
I forgot to take a pic, but here's one from last year:
 

Days 2 and 3, we checked on our decomposing pumpkin and observed its changes.

Large Group

Day 1, we read White Rabbit's Color Book and added colored water to cups with paper towels sticking out of them to start an experiment.

Day 2, we read Mouse Paint and checked on our experiment. The colors had risen up the paper towels, and dripped into the empty cups to mix and make new colors. We mixed the remaining colors, just to get to watch them change.

Day 3, we watched this Primary Colors video (several times, by popular demand), and read Color Train, then sorted things by color.

Day 4, we read The Mixed Up Chameleon. We then painted paper plates to make our changing chameleons.

We also learned 3 new songs, Mitch the Fish, Scat the Cat, and a rainbow song.

I'm Scat the Cat, I'm a happy cat,
if you don't like my color, you can change it like that!

I'm Mitch the Fish, I can swim and I can swish,
I can change my color, if I wish!

Small Group
Miss Kim was not able to come these last 2 weeks, so these activities were actually done as a whole group, instead. The kids did very well!!

Day 1, we read Freight Train, then searched for colors around the room. You can even see that chairs and bean bags were brought over! They had so much fun sorting.

Day 3, we mixed play dough together to make our color wheels.

Day 4, we made paint mixing worksheets and mixed all the primary colors together to make secondary colors.


We mixed the primary colors in so many different ways, on every day, so I hope the kids remember now all the colors they can make from the primary colors! We had a fun and messy week playing with color!

Eric Carle

All of my nerdy teacher dreams are coming true with these fun author/illustrator weeks! I love hearing them use the words author and illustrator, and even say that they want to be one some day. I also love hearing them use the names of the people we're learning about and seeing their excitement as we learn more about them. So, this week was all about another common favorite, Eric Carle, and they were so excited to see the books and show me which ones they had at home and already knew all about. It was fun to help them learn about an author they already knew, and introduce them to other books by him too.

 
Dramatic Play
Since so many books by Eric Carle are about bugs, we played with bugs in dramatic play, and had all of Eric Carle's bug books as part of it. This was a huge hit with the kids!! We even took the bug catchers outside each day to search for live bugs too.
 
 
 
Blocks
We went with the bug theme and had a large bug floor puzzle, plus bug dominoes, and bug number puzzles. These were lots of fun and got lots of play time. They especially loved the floor puzzle and seeing such large pictures of their favorite bugs.
 
 
For the second week, I highlighted Eric Carle's book, Friends, and set out 2 multicultural floor puzzles. The kids needed more help from me on these, but we got them put together with cooperation!

 
Art
 Q tip painting
 



Easel painting
I have a few pics of the kids doing it and it was a huge hit! They loved painting like a real artist :) Since I only have 1 easel with 2 sides, they were great at taking turns at the easel or sitting at the table and it was a constant turnover of kids painting.

Tissue paper squares and glue. 
No pics here either, but lots of great creativity and art!

Cloud art
Inspired by Eric Carle's book, Clouds, I set our blue paper and cotton balls with glue so they could make cloud pictures. We hung some of them up around our spring tree since spring can be cloudy and rainy.
 
Small Manips
Ladybug ABC puzzle with The Grouchy Ladybug
 
Hungry Caterpillar Colorforms storyboard
 
Hungry Caterpillar puzzle
 
Rhyme puzzle 

Snack
We ate some snacks from The Hungry Caterpillar: plums, strawberries, apples, oranges, strawberries, pears, swiss cheese, and cake. They ate as they watched the movie version of the story. The movie came in handy on the next rainy day when we couldn't go inside, so we watched a few more stories during snack.
We read Pancakes! Pancakes! and made my favorite pancake recipe. They were a huge hit! They each ate 3 and wanted more. You can find the recipe here.  

Outside
 I filled the sensory table with blue water and rubber ducks and had the book, 10 Little Rubber Ducks


Being interested in bugs, we took the bug catchers out each day and had lots of fun searching for and catching bugs. I had found some big worms the weekend before while pulling some plastic out of my garden area, so I saved some to pull up with the kids and we found lots of huge worms! They loved that. We also found slugs and ants. One day, we saw a curled up spider and thought it was dead. They asked if they could pick it up and I just asked them to use the tweezers (only because spiders freak me out). Once they got it in a bug catcher, it started running like crazy and freaked me out, but not the kids! They loved it and one girl wore it the whole time outside. Gross, but I'm glad they don't have my irrational fears.
 
 
Large Group
 Day 1, we read The Hungry Caterpillar, and made pattern caterpillars with pipe cleaners and beads. I had leaves with holes punched in them and they thought it was so fun helping their caterpillars "eat."


 
Day 2, we read The Mixed Up Chameleon, and talked about Eric Carle's style of illustrating. I had paper with different colors painted on it, and they told me what shapes to cut out and they helped me put together a picture of their choosing, an elephant. Kind of :)
 
Day 3, we read Polar Bear Polar Bear, then worked on graphing the characters from that book.
Day 4, we read The Tiny Seed, then planted sunflowers in a cup.
 
Small Group

 I helped my groups work on their number books.
Our mom volunteers helped our kids make Hungry Caterpillar pattern necklaces.
They also played The Hungry Caterpillar game with the kids to work on counting.