Kite counting

As a part of letter K week, we created this Kite hopscotch for the little kids to practice their number order from 11-20. Click here for your free download ! We found it best to be laminated but you can also print it on card stock paper.

Painting with ice cubes

What a fun activity for a hot day! We used it as an art project for "The Letter I" but this is still something the kids like to come back to and I have to reload my ice cube trays with more paint very often.

You will need:

ice cube tray

washable paint

water

card stock paper

You have to prepare the trays night before. Pick colors and dilute them with water. Pour them into the tray and place into a freezer for overnight.

 

Take them out immediately before kids are ready to use them because they melt fairly quickly in this weather.  Squeeze the paint out of the tray and have kids paint away.

 

Because it is hot right now, kids appreciate the cold ice in their hands and don't complain!

 

Mix colors, smudge them, share them - have fun!

 

 These are the results! Unplanned effect? The table surface pattern showed up on our pictures! It looked really cool!

Letter I is for Ice cream

Letter I for Ice cream!


We start with the letter recognition.
We lay out the letters (alphabet cards) that they worked on so far, which is A through I in this case. We place them on the floor and have the kids pick a letter, you pick one as well, (if the new/introduced letter is not chosen by the kids the adult usually grabs that letter) Have them run around and sing "we're running, we're running, we're running in a circles."

  Then you yell out "stop!" or "freeze!" This is where they place the card on their head and we ask: "What letter do you have on your head?" or "What letter do I have on my head".

It seems to work with our kids so far they learned their letters this way.

Then we go straight into our do-a-dot activity. The kids dot around the letter I.

Next up is letter hunt. Sometimes I find perfect objects for our activities. How are these cute little ice creams I found for our letter hunt? One container includes ice cream erasers and the other ice cream magnets.

Find letter I on the page. You can download the page here.

The little kids are learning patterns. Go ahead and download here. If you are just starting patterns, say the pattern out loud and have the kids finish it with you. You can also have them finish it themselves, or if they are advanced, have them work on it alone and then review it after they finish. 

For Art Jar we made colorful popsicles. Please, see this post  for instructions. 

We created number order 1-5. Have the kids put the numbers in order and create a yummy ice cream!

You can download Ice cream 1-5 here.

For more math, we counted ice cream flavors. 

You can download Ice cream counting here. Have the kids count the ice cream flavors and place the same amount of objects underneath the ice cream. We used small marshmallows because we didn't have enough magnets or erasers. 

And how about making your own ice cream? Here is a link to a separate post that gives you detailed instructions. Yummy!

This letter was too much fun! Enjoy and don't forget to check out some of the letter I books listed below.

 

Make your own ice cream

For our treat on letter I day, we made ICE CREAM!

You will need:

ziploc bags - 1 sandwich size, 1 gallon size


For the sandwich size bag:
1/2 cup of whole milk
1 Tablespoon of sugar
1 teaspoon of vanilla


and for the gallon size bag:
1/2 bag of ice
6 Tablespoons of rock salt

We wrote kids names on each of the bags so they don't get mixed up.

Have the kids help you measure the ingredients for the sandwich bag.

Put the vanilla in.

Then pour the milk. Ask the kids to tell you when to stop.

Put the sugar in, close up the bag and have the kids carefully mix it by gently squashing the bag.

Get the ingredients ready to the gallon size bag. Pour the ice into the gallon size bag and add the salt.

Place the small ziploc bag (make sure it's really closed tight) in the large ziploc bag and close the big bag up. Now comes the fun part for the kids - shake the bag for about 5 minutes. We had to help as their hands got cold from touching the bag.

You might have to add few minutes to the shaking and stop when the consistency reaches the consistency of ice cream. 

Squeeze it into the bowl and your dessert is ready!

Letter H is for Heart

Letter H Heart activities can be easily used for Valentine's Day party as well!

After the kids learn to recognize letter H, we do a letter hunt. You can download the page here. It also comes with letters E, F, G, I, and J for future Letter Hunts. Simply have them place conversation hearts on all letter H they can find on the page.

For math, we are focusing on finishing patterns, so this is the perfect activity for that. You can download the Heart pattern here. 

If you are just starting patterns, say the pattern out loud and have the kids finish it with you. You can also have them finish it themselves, or if they are advanced, have them work on it alone and then review it after they finish. 

We created a Heart puzzle that you can download here. Simply print it, cut it up, and you can possibly laminate it if you wish.

Have the kids put it together.

In the next activity we combined color recognition and counting to 5. You can download Heart color number find here. 

You will be using the Conversation Hearts again. After counting the color hearts, have the kids find the same color hearts in their container and place them on the paper. Repeat until you cover all the color hearts on the page.

Our last activity is the Heart Hopscotch. You can find instructions in this post.

Letter G is for Gumball

Who doesn't LOVE gumballs? This was the most fun the kids ever had with their letter of the week!

First little kids did the letter hunt. They found letter G on this Letter hunt page. Download for free here.

Yes, the gumballs rolled a bit but that made it more fun! (For the kids anyway ;-) If your child has steady hand it will work fine.

Page for the alphabet book was G for glitter.

We traced the letter G from Confessions of a homeschooler,

and made some do-a-dot art with the letter G as well.

Next up is gumball number hopscotch. 

Download here.

Place them on the ground in the wrong order so the kids don't know what number is coming. If you just started number order, then you might want to place them in order so the kids don't get confused. Have them count the gumballs and then jump to the next one.

This was a big hit. 

Kids generally like when learning something includes motion.

We did number order with our number note cards. 

Have the kids put the cards in right order and then place the right amount of gumballs on each card.

The big kids used gumballs for addition. This time it was for a worksheet called "How many ways can you make 5?" They had two extra cupcake liners to divide the 5 gumballs in two different group amounts. 

Here are some suggestions for our letter G books from Amazon

Letter D is for Dinosaur

After our great two weeks of Earth Day day-by-day series, we are back to our regular activities posts. This time we would like to share some letter D activities that you can do with your preschoolers. As you can see below, the big kids participated as well!!!

The little kids are working on their special ABC book. Every week we go over one letter of the alphabet and they decorate a page with something that begins with that particular letter. We did it last year with the big kids and the final product was really rewarding for them. I will create a separate post to explain to you the process. 

Anyway, back to letter D - first they decorated letter D page with Do-a-dot paint (D for dots).

Then, they went on to trace letter D with erasable marker. We got the template from Erica at Confessions of the homeschooler. We print the page and place it inside a protective sleeve. That way we can keep practicing over and over.

From the same website, we printed this sheet. The kids use Do-a-dot to color all the circles of the letter in. This helps them to faster recognize the shape.

It's time to dig up some dinosaurs! We put small rubber dinos into a plastic bag filled with shredded paper. Then I hid them. Be prepared that this could become dusty and messy but overall they liked digging up the dinosaurs!

The big kids used the small rubber dinosaurs to help them with additions.