The Mitten Reenactment

 In Pre-K, "Retelling a story" is an important standard. Retelling can be done by simply recalling scenes from the story, or drawing a picture or reenactment using props. We decided to reenact "The Mitten".

The Mitten by Jan Brett is a very good book to read and is perfect if your theme of the week is "Winter". It is a story about a little boy who looses a mitten in snow and some animals make that mitten their home until the mitten stretches and pops. It is a cute little story about winter animals trying to get ready for their long sleep! There are few versions of this title.... and most of them have similar animals. 

We got our masks from Jan Brett's website . All you have to do is print them, laminate for longevity and use them. Pre-K 4 kiddos enjoyed it..... We did not have Jan Brett's version. Our version had just 5 animals, so we had to do this reenactment several times in order to give everyone a chance. 

Our version book came with CD. So we listened to the story during large group time. At this time we retold story by sequencing the events in the story. 

Later in the day, we did reenactment. We sat in a circle, and the 5 masked animal friends waited while Ms. J read the story.

As the animals were called, they got into the mitten (Blanket for us).

 We insisted they hold their masks up.... just for fun!! and the picture too ;)

As the mitten popped.. all the animals jumped out of the blanket and went back to their spots.

Kiddos loved waiting for each animal to get under the blanket and then for all 5 to pop out.... for them that was the most exciting part. However, 5 rounds later...... all kiddos could retell the story :D

A simple thing like reenactment makes learning so much fun. Lucky for us it was super cold that day, so this was perfect activity to keep us busy during our outside play time. 

Besides masks, using puppets or pictures glued on popsicle sticks make retelling fun!!

Until next time,

Cheers =)

Alphabet Pops

I got this idea from Pinterest (was there any doubt I would find it anywhere else :P)... originally the idea is from Kinderdi where they have shared pictures of the letter pops and some activities you can do with it. Here is how I made mine:

The materials I used were: Foam, Popsicle sticks, uppercase foam letters and lower case sticker letters (bought it from Michael's scrapbook section-they are chipboard letters) and hot glue gun. 

I cut out appropriate size circles and glued the letters using hot glue. Although both the foam letters and chipboard letters had sticky back, they would not stick on the foam, so I used hot glue. Then stick the foam on the popsicle sticks. 

The colorful letters make it look interesting and inviting. I did the vowel in one color. Although we are not really supposed to teach kids about vowels in Pre-K... I have some higher ability students who could understand this concept. So I thought no harm trying. 

We have broken these out in our classroom...right now we use them as a ticket to get off the carpet and get ready for lunch... I pull out random letter, point to a kid and he/she has to tell me what letter/sound. Kinderdi suggests using them in different ways-letter identification, putting them in order, sorting by colors. I made lower case...so they could play matching uppercase-lowercase! 

My next intention of using these are to put in alphabetical order- give each child a letter pop, then ask what letter come first (they should say "A")...ask child with A to come up, then ask what comes after B....and so on.Can't wait to try this game. 

Until next time,

Enjoy!!

Small Dice--Alphabet/Number

This was one of the first things I started making for my classroom. We have these small foam dice and students love rolling and counting the dots on those. Then I came across this dice template (google search) that is a free printable and can be customized. As a teacher and crafter I am all for "Freebies".... whether ideas or templates ;)

Kids love the idea of rolling a dice, waiting to see what it lands on so they can tell me....they are excited not only for themselves, but also what their friends roll lands on!! So I decided I needed to do more with these dice. I started by looking for Blank Foam Dice....found some in my local school supply store..they were like $5 for 2 .... and the bigger ones were little too expensive. So I decided to search for one and found this Dice Template .

Here is what I created with the dice template.

For the Alphabets dice I used Alpha Stickers I had (from my crafting supplies), hand wrote the numbers, and punched small circles for the last 2 dice. In the Alphabet Stickers I did leave out X and Q .... I know I need to include those letters...so I might just create a fifth dice with those 2 letters and 4 letters repeating. All the dice are wrapped with contact paper for longevity.

With the Alphabet Dice, I intend to practice letter sounds and letter recognition

Number dice is for recognizing numbers

Dot Dice is for one to one correspondence and counting.

To make these, Print out the template and cut it out to shape. Then go ahead stick/write before gluing the box together. For the first box, I put it together and then wrapped it with contact paper... to realize very quickly that I made it hard on self for no reason. Best way would be to wrap the contact paper on the template (after you cut it out) and then gluing it together.

Once you do first box, the others will be very fast and easy to make. We have used this template to also make dice for Math Graph Games and simple love using this template. Easy and convenient!!

I can't wait to use these with the kids... I know they are going to love it.

Until next time,

Cheers =)