Revisit: The Very Hungry Caterpillar

We love this story for so many reasons. We love the art and we love the idea to grow into something wonderful.  This revisit was mainly a review for Benji  and an opportunity to extend higher learning for Jacob. 

We read the book and went over all the stages of the caterpillar and then learned our really big word Metamorphosis. We talked about other things that go through a metamorphosis.

We used our story helpers from Kizclub to help retell the story and to let Benji work on sequence. After that we worked on summarizing the story and used this wonderful worksheet to record our summery. 

We also did some fun crafts. We cut out a simple set of wings for a butterfly and then used a craft stick for the body. We used sponges to paint.

We did some recycle art for the caterpillar. We reused egg cartons and painted them and used some left over scraps from the art bin to make them special.

Here is the final product. Don't forget to display the art in the classroom or in your home. 

Extensions and Resources:

• The Eric Carle Web Site
• Sparkle Box- free printables and lesson ideas
• Homeschool Share - tons of printables and ideas for a full unit of learning
• Scholastic - Lesson plans

Art: You can too!

Have broken crayons? No Problem!


We did some crayon recycling with our old bin of crayons that we've had for about six years now. Some of the crayons were starting to look a little sad and no one would use them and so this project was born. 

The first step was to sort by color, some variation is acceptable such as light green and dark greens together.

Now for the tedious part which is peeling off the paper and breaking them.

While you are doing this part preheat your oven to 250 degrees.

After all the crayons are ready you will want to prepare what you are going to melt them in. I have some silicon molds that I am using, but any kind will work well. If you don't have any of those, an old cupcake tin will also work. The thing to keep in mind is that you will probably not want to use it for food after word, so cheap is good! I am placing my mold on a cookie sheet that is lined with foil and wax paper should things some how spill.

Then I place the whole thing in the oven and let it melt till it is all completely melted (about 10-15 min.)

After it is all melted, I took it out very carefully. Remember, it's melted wax and it is very hot including the molds so be very cautious and let this step be for the grownups only.

As you can tell from the photo above the waxes and the pigment are needing to be stirred, a popsicle stick or tooth pick will work just fine.

After that, you just wait for the wax to harden and your have a new set of crayons ready for coloring. Just be sure that if you make a brown one, to make sure the kids know it's not a peanut butter cup!

*With the holiday seasons just around the corner, some fun molds could lend this to be a great home made gift. I plan to make a set using a christmas tree mold for my kids I teach sunday school to.

A Pair of Socks: A story time connection

Stop! Don't throw out all those cute tiny socks that have been out grown by your little cuties. I saved a few of mine and we are using them for our story time connection with the book A Pair of Socks by Stuart J. Murphy. The story is fairly short in length but is long on ideas for learning connections from learning to count by two's to color matching and more.
         After our book, we looked for rhyming words and highlighted them.

Then I took a small bin and put the little socks in there for the kids to match up.

 They loved matching the colors and patterns and then clipping them together with clothespins. I then opened up the opportunity for them to color their own pair of socks.

 For those that like dictation and copywork, I found this wonderful poem:

"Two" by Cynthia Cappetta

Two hands, two feet, two eyes, two knees— You have a pair of each of these.

Mittens, socks, gloves, and shoes, These things also come in twos.

Children born in pairs have a special name. Some twins look different, and some look the same. 

Extensions and links:

*I found some really great extensions from Weekly Reader(do you remember them from when you were young? I do, and they've gone digital)-"What is a Pair" is a great edition of that reader where I found the above poem and other great activities.

*Mathstart also had great ideas for hands on learning geared for kids three and up. 

*Laugh, Paint, Create had a great blog post about making a sock collage. It's a great idea that can foster scissor and glueing skills.  

Art: Primary Colors

We had an art lesson on primary colors and we also learned a song to help facilitate learning them.


The supplies we used were a set of watercolors(cheap ones work just as well as the expensive ones. Tempera paint would work well here as well. You could also use colored pencils or crayons, but they don't work as well in demonstrations for the very young), a small paper plate, a paper for mixing paints on. You can duplicate the coloring sheet I made very easily by just drawing a circle and drawing lines through to make six segments. I also printed on a poster a copy of the song.  You can have the children hold up or point to circles cut from construction paper of the primary colors as they are said in the song as an extension.

"The Primary Song"(to the tune of twinkle twinkle little star)

Primary, primary what are you?

I am red or yellow or blue.

Primary, what can I do with you?

Mix us into colors that are new.

Primary, primary what are you?

I am red or yellow or blue.

For the painting, I had the kids first fill in the triangles with the primary colors and then showed them how to take two colors and make the color that goes between them. If you don't want to do this with paint, you can use crayons by coloring both colors lightly over each other. I then explained that the new colors were called secondary colors.

Just make sure you display the fine works of art when they are dry. After all, art is made to be admired.

Art!

Each week we will have an art lesson. I picked up the curriculum this summer and it is called Building Motor skills in Art. I really liked how it worked on fine motor skills and did not require a lot of fancy materials. I could make it age appropriate for each of my kids as well with out having to get separate workbooks as well.

The lesson this week was about coloring in the lines.
We first worked with crayons and a coloring page with some geometric shapes on them. You can practice these steps as well. Just make your own paper with a few shapes.

• color in one direction
• color to the line, but not beyond it
• highlight the lines of the shape

After a fine effort on the coloring page, we did a larger project using "do a dot" bingo markers. If you don't have these you can use lots of other things like sponges and some tempera paint or scraps of colored paper. I made a large picture in pencil of the state of Texas on butcher paper. Bigger is better for this kind of project. You could do any shape that works for you. Just sketch it out on big paper and make sure it doesn't have too much detail. Then I let the kids use just a few colors for the inside and a few for the outside of the shape. This was our finish product:

I had it hanging on the wall as we stamped, and I have to say I was very impressed my walls stayed nice and clean!

Arts and Crafts!

Remember that macaroni we colored? We had tons of fun making pictures with it and making necklaces with it.
civil war quilt squares

A)Megatron                          B) Optimas Prime

(They are transformers can't you see the resemblance!)

Here are Benji's creations he was super happy about being allowed to use the glue















Here is Benji's necklace below, Jacob gave his necklace to his Education Supervisor at school

Arts and Crafts!

Anyone who knows me, knows how much I love to craft......being on a budget, I decided to skip on real beads and made some colored macaroni. I have for some reason been intimidated by doing this since the only recipe I had seen called for using alcohol and dye....until I saw it done on the crafty classroom using food coloring and vinegar. Easy enough! So without further ado, here it is step by step.
These are the materials you need to dye noodles

• vinegar
• noodles
• plastic sandwich bags
• food coloring

Add an 1/8 of a cup(fill half of a 1/4 cup, just eye ball it!) of vinegar to the noodles in a bag















Add 10 - 12 drops of color, the more drops the darker and more vibrant it will be















Shake Shake Shake!!!!!















Spread out on paper towels and let dry until they are hard noodles again and start crafting!















Here is the final product















It was really easy and just seeing them dry made my kids eager to make projects of them.