A Garden of Flowers & Letters... and it's FREEBIE Friday!

    And… we have flowers! Teeny, tiny flowers…but FLOWERS! 

The munchkin was SO excited!!

   For our Gardening Theme, the little munchkin created this cute picture by searching for all the right letters to make a Garden of Letters!

   The munchkin also practiced some writing with her Letter Rr and Ss writing mini-books, similar to the ones she did for Letters Gg and Ff. 

Click on each Picture to pick up your own FREE copies of these 

mini writing books, which are also being featured at Teaching Blog Addict's Freebie Friday!!

   I also came across a post by This Reading Mama and decided to try something like it with my little one. It is called Reading The Alphabet. Our activity focused on Tracking Print, Letter Identification and Letter/Sound Connection.

This Garden theme sure was fun! 

Now to move on to some SWEET stuff… 

Stay tuned!

Summer Vacation is here! YAY!!! So...Salt and Soup anyone??

   Yay!! Summer Vacation has officially begun! FINALLY! 

   I said it many times and I will say it again- This year is Year #9 for me and has by far, been the most challenging year for me! Thankfully I had a great team and director to help me get through the year. And I think this vacation is a very well earned and deserved one! I intend to enjoy it to the fullest! 

   My plans are to relax and as much as I want to start my planning for next year, I am going to try and resist the temptation and wait until after our Disney World vacation in July! The only work I plan to do is the fun learning stuff with my little one, while trying to keep my teenage son from being bored all summer!

   The little munchkin and I have been learning about the letters, Gg, Ff, Rr and we still had some work to do with letter Ss.

   We experimented with salt painting and did she love it!

   The look on her face as she watched the watercolor spread as she dripped paint on the salt is priceless. 

The whole painting process occupied about 20 minutes of her time!

Can you find the letters G, Z and S that she made??

    I purchased this Scrabble Soup game on Amazon last summer but it wasn’t until recently that the little munchkin became interested in learning letters. I was going to do an ABC Soup Scoop game with her, but I pulled out this game instead.

   First we just scooped letters and identified them. 

   Then we attempted to play the actual Scrabble game. She was amused for the first few turns and then just wanted to scoop letters and play with it; so she did.

  Tomorrow we will be wrapping up the Gardening Theme and move on quickly because we have to get ready to dive into our Virtual Book Club Summer Camp, hosted by Toddler Approved, Rainy Day Mum and The Educator’s Spin On It!

   It begins on Monday, June 24th and we are very excited about it!

S is for Sand and Sun…Sounds Sensational!

   Our study of the letter S came just as we began our Five Senses unit.

  This school year, I believe that a lot of my kiddos have a bigger need for sensory activities and this was the time to dive into Sensory Fun!

   The munchkins made the letter Ss with Sand and also searched for letter Ss triangles and glued them onto a circle to make a sun!

   My favorite part of the week was when I had time to make some Sensory Bags!! I took all the great ideas on Pinterest and made some of my own very fun Sensory Bags.

    I made most of them with clear hair gel (which I picked up at the Dollar Tree), food coloring and lots of glitter and random art collage stuff I pulled out of the art closet in the classroom. The green googly eye one was made with aloe vera gel that I had sitting in my cabinet. And one was made with rice, blue food coloring and some sea animal counters.

   I sealed them pretty good with packaging tape, and then placed them inside another Ziploc bag and sealed it as well. My kiddos are pretty rough, so I made sure to REALLy seal those bags shut!

   And wouldn’t you know? One of them still ended up leaking by the end of the day!! But hey, It happens! 

   I had a blast watching the kids explore the bags. They touched them, smashed them, and smelled them!

   

    I even captured a great picture (from across the room) of one munchkins putting the bag on his head and rubbing it! I can bet it felt pretty good!

     There were other activities during the week that involved sand, which is such a fun sensory experience. I have kids who sit at the sand table all throughout Free Choice Time, so I knew I had to think of more sand activities that could be done at the tables.  We made letters in the sand and I put out sandpaper and markers and encouraged them to write and draw on small sheets of sandpaper.

Some kids really loved it and went back to the art table 3 different times during Center Time & Free Choice Time!

   The Sensory Bags were just a brief introduction to our Five Senses unit. I am excited and eager to make more sensory objects for my munchkins to explore with their senses throughout the next few weeks!