The Very Hungry Caterpillar and the letter C...Continued

Today I was reminded of one of the finer aspects of teaching from home. Callen had been up all night cutting his first tooth (which I was so excited to finally start to see it peek through) so when Kaitlyn walked into my room this morning and said, " Mommy I want to snuggle I don't feel good" I was so glad that my answer could be yes...we had no place we had to be and so she climbed into my bed and we snuggled all morning :) It made me one happy mama! So school started a little late for us today more like lunch time. Today we finished up our lesson on the letter C. We reviewed the letters we have learned previously (A, K and C) and practiced writing on her dry erase board. She is getting much better at tracing the letters.

We started today off with our first activity a Hungry caterpillar necklace. This activity really challenged her fine motor skills and introduced patterning. It also helped her to retell the story of the very hungry Caterpillar which she did so very proudly tonight at bedtime.

First let's start with the prep work. This past weekend we made dyed pasta noodles these are great for counting, sorting and making pattern necklaces. First you get some pasta noodles and shape size will do, then you put them in a ziploc bag with a splash of rubbing alcohol, add a few drops of food coloring and close the bag. Have your little one swirl the coloring and the noodles around till they are all coated. Set them on wax paper to dry over night. The next day they will be ready for patterns :)

 The Very Hungry Caterpillar Story Necklace

So that brings us to this afternoon.....Kaitlyn and I reread the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, she helped me with the counting, we reviewed the days of the week. And we talked about the colors we saw in the story. When we were all done I gave her the Caterpillar coloring page, found in our Printables section I showed her how to stay in the lines and focus on coloring. At one point I was talking to her and she said.."Shh! mommy I am trying to focus on my colors!" Gotta love her :) So she matched each color up to the color in the book before she started coloring on her paper. When she was all done I cut them all out while she played with her color puzzle, and other color games we have been using this week. I also put a small hole punch in each little piece of food and two on the caterpillar. Next we tied her string to the end of a small bucket so her pieces wouldn't fall off. We added one piece of pasta and then 1 piece of food from the story ( we worked backwords starting with the slice of watermelon and eventually ending at the apple) We followed a pattern when adding the noodles, going through each color. the food pieces were to delicate for her to put on so I did those and she did most of the pasta....she worked hard using her fine motor skills to thread each piece onto her pasta, there were quite a few so I helped in between so she wouldn't get burned out. When we finally added all of the food we put the caterpillar on last. Now we were all done with her Very Hungry Caterpillar Story necklace! She could now use the necklace to retell the entire story of The Hungry Caterpillar!

Patternpillars

So our next activity we practiced our pattern making, first with the colored noodles and then with some red and green pom poms, we talked about ABAB patterns and ABBABB patterns. Kaitlyn quickly got the hang of it and was rocking right along. After we were done we use the pom poms to make her very own hungry caterpillar she could keep in her bug collecting jar (mason jar). I much rather prefer the pom pom critters to the live ones :)

Color Games

Kaitlyn put together this puzzle all week naming the colors and practicing her spatial awareness by completing it....It's a lot harder than it looks. I also too some crayon cutouts I had and made a little game you can find items like this at Trend or your local teacher store. I spread out several colors of crayons and I would call out a color and she would have to put it in the crayon box. I introduced the concept of shades ( light, dark and combined colors like red-orange etc.)

The C Page

This is our C page for our ABC book we started it on Monday and just finished it today. I cut out the circles from her salt painting and then drew a letter C onto her tissue paper circles. She aligned the circles onto it and then we added the finishing touches of the eyes and the antennae ( pipe cleaners)

Here is our finished unit on the letter C

 

 

The Very Hungry Caterpillar and the letter C

This morning we started with the letter C while we ate our breakfast. We talked about the letter C and Kaitlyn named some words that had the c sound ( caterpillar, ice cream * close enough, cupcake) Then we got out some of our homemade fundough that we made the night before. This is my favorite recipes because it is super easy and doesn't involve cooking....and everyone who knows me knows I am not much of a domestic goddess in the kitchen...but I must say I have improved a bit over the past year. At least I am no longer trying to dice onions with an egg slicer...yes that actually happened. One of my many cooking endeavors that went terribly wrong. Anyway...here is the recipe:

1 Cup Flour

1/2 cup Salt

1/2 Cup Water

1 pkg of kool-aid ( for color and smell)

Mix all ingredients in a  bowl and mix with hands into one large dough ball. Put in an air tight container for the next day. I've found if you make it the night before it is far less sticky.

We used the fun dough to make the letter C on our Letter C Mat (Get your very own mat in the printables section on my blog)

I slid it into a plastic page protector to keep the surface fundough friendly, and so I can reuse the letter mat throughout the week.

I also had Kaitlyn trace the letter with her finger as well as use her pom pom's to outline the letter.

After some letter hunting ( playing I spy the letter C) we read the book

The Very Hungry Caterpillar By: Eric Carle

She helped me name the colors and count the fruit as we read the story.

When we finished we started our Art project for our ABC book

First I had precut several circles out of tissue paper in all colors. Then I had Kaitlyn glue them on to her 10X10 paper, naming the colors and counting as she went.

Then we started our Finger Salt painting, we will let this dry overnight so the salt crystals set with the paint.

I squeezed green and yellow paint onto Kaitlyn's paper. She took a few pinches of salt and Kosher salt onto her paper. Then she spread the paint around with her hands. After she was done with the green one we did a red one in the same way.

We will save both of these till Wednesday and finish our Letter C page for our ABC book then.

Next we read the Book One By:  Kathryn Otoshi

Which we got from the Public Library, a great resource for kids this age. Kaitlyn loves picking and choosing her own books and reading them each night. this story is all about colors and numbers. It is a great book for teaching the color names, what a number looks like and basic counting skills.

To reinforce the book we got started on our Colorful Caterpillar Cupcakes!

Kaitlyn helped me make the cupcakes in our Mixer. I had her count out the muffin wrappers and place them in the muffin tin. Perfect review and helps to teach her one to one number correspondence.

After the cupcake wrappers were filled with batter.  I sprinkled a few drops of food coloring into each cupcake (step 3). I had Kaitlyn stir them with a toothpick (Step 4) and then put them into the oven to bake! 

She was so excited when they came out all colorful!

We separated the cupcakes and sorted them into color groups for two cupcake projects.

The first project was our Very Hungry Caterpillar Cupcake

We took all of the green cupcakes and one red one to make our Very Hungry Caterpillar

We didn't ice these because they were so colorful already. We used some crunchy Chinese noodles for his antennae and his legs. We used some round yellow candy sprinkle dots ( Target Cake dept. ) and some raisins for eyes. Kaitlyn was so proud of her Very Hungry Caterpillar!

Our second project was Sorting and icing all of the colorful cupcakes. Kaitlyn counted them and put them into groups, we reviewed all the skills that she learned today with this fun and yummy activity...Thank goodness we have  playdate this afternoon and we will have some help consuming these yummy cupcakes!

Join us Wednesday as we explore patternpillars, finish our Letter C page and make our very own Very Hungry Caterpillar necklace!

Week 2: The Letter C and The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Next week we start our new letter. Letter "C" We will be reading the story The Very Hungry Caterpillar and doing activities that go along with the story....Next week we will be in the kitchen cooking up some colorful caterpillar cupcakes, creating our letter "C" page for our ABC book and learning all about patternpillars. I have a lot of great activities in store this week so come along as we learn a few more lessons on the little stuff!