Rainbow Beading

Found this perfect container that has six compartments!  

Some kids are just putting on one of each color and one of  my little friends spent a long time filling up the whole string in a rainbow pattern!

When she was done and showing it to her friends, another little girl said, "It looks like it's from Africa!"  She's right :)

St. Patrick's Day Practical Life

My shelves are filled with St. Patrick's Day works right now.  These are just a few of the most recent one's I've put together and love :)

Paper Bowl Turtle Art

 This is a great project when studying tortoises, turtles, and/or reptiles.  For our Animal Kingdom study we focused on the tortoise for our reptile study and even brought a real one into the classroom for a few weeks!  What a great hands on learning experience!  We discussed the tortoise's life cycle and had parts of the tortoise classification cards.  We also read many, many books on this topic!

Here's how the work is set up.  I just photocopied on construction paper the head, legs, and tail shape.

 They first use Tacky Glue to glue down the bowl in the middle of the paper.  Then cut (or pin push) out all the parts to attach to the underside of the bowl.  Finally they paint the bowl.  I used green and brown paints.  We had our live tortoise right there as we did this :)

Here he is!  Everyone named their tortoise as well!

This is Herfy.  He's my friend's tortoise who let us borrow him for our reptile study!  This is a picture of him crawling all around the circle rug!

Valentine inspired easel painting

For a twist on traditional easel painting (which secretely drives me crazy with the big brushes and the mess it makes!)  I put out small paint squirt bottles (in the cake making supply isle at Michaels).  Filled with red, white, and purple the children put small amounts in the supplied paint pallet and tint it with the white creating lavender and pink!  They can use the dark colors too as there's enough compartments in the pallet for lavender, pink, white, dark red, and dark purple.

With smaller brushes supplied they are able to paint more detailed pictures.  Not pictured is a paint holder with water in it to rinse their brushes before changing color and a damp sponge to dab their brush clean and dry.

1-10 heart counting

My director made this and its' been very fun this month!  The cards have a clip art heart on each one and they are lined up as you would would the counters in cards and counters (representing odd and even numbers) but with control of error!  The hearts came from Target a couple years ago.  Although you could use valentine color flat marbles or heart erasers which seem easy to find during February!

Animal Kingdom Classification of Vertebrates

For a variation on vertebrate classification (rather than the picture cards) this is using small animal objects.  I just picked up some random figures at stores such as Michaels and went through all my unit boxes and practical life goodies to come up with 5-6 of each!  With all the objects it's very inviting to the child and fun to do!

Owl Art

For our Animal Kingdom study we are doing a week on birds, particularly owls.  This art project is from years ago during my internship where my lead teacher did it for our animal habitat unit.

Fold a paper plate in thirds with the sides being the owls wings.  I have a dish of googly eyes and some small, orange triangles cut up.  These are the kind that you peel off the back like a sticker (you can also use orange construction paper but we just happened to have a sheet of orange sticky foam!) 

They first paint the owl with brown paint.  I demonstrated lots of "drip catching" so it's not too thick as most owls around here have white on them as well.  Then they glued on the eyes and beak!