Month: November 2014

Turkey Art Project from Colored Paper

One way to make really cute animals of any kind is to figure out some wacky looking eyeballs. I found a few cute and free printables for eyeballs that just MAKE these Thanksgiving Turkeys!

Turkey Art Project for Kinder Kids

I started by cutting out strips of 6 colors of butcher paper; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. We did all the colors of the rainbow. I cut them approximately 2 inches by 10 or 11 inches. If the kids are kinder age or younger, the shorter strips are easier for them to manipulate. If you have older kids you can go longer, maybe 14 inches.

Cut strips 2 inches by 11 inches for a small TURKEY art project. 

After cutting strips fold and glue the edges into “raindrop” shapes. 

Then we took each strip and made it into a “raindrop” shape by taking the two ends and gluing them together. We did that to all 6. Then we took 2 circles of brown for the head and body and glued them together. If your kids are young, glue them together for them before you start the project. I glued the kinder kids’ together before school started.

Turkey Art Project 

Cute Turkey Art for Kindergarten. 

I cut the 2 circles about 4 1/2 inches and 6 inches. Then we cut orange, triangle shaped beaks. I had about 10 styles of eyeballs for the kids to cut out. I got the eyeballs and I found, while looking for some eyeballs to download, some cute faces I could use for fast finishers HERE at Dabbles and Babbles. Kids LOVE putting faces on blank heads! This will make a great bribe to get a math quiz finished!

The eyeballs I found are HERE at Flamingo Toes. Another one I found HERE at Kiki Creates blog. Another blogger had such a cute post using wiggly eyeballs for a class behavior motivator. Her darling post is Here at Teacher to the Core. Check her printable eyeballs out HERE. Zombie eyeballs Here on TPT.

I had this book full of Eyeballs galore to choose from for our Thanksgiving Turkeys! 

Yellow Accordian legs 1/2  inch by about 10 or 11 inches and the feet I just cut out of orange construction paper. 

I have a book I bought years ago with black and white eyeballs that I also used. I will see if I can design something myself to add to this post. If you want you could also used wiggly eyes from the craft store instead. Oh and we added a red “waddle” or “gobble” or whatever you call it under the beak.

Kindergarten Turkey Art for Thanksgiving 

Anyway, glue the “feathers” on the back of the turkey in rainbow color order. (Red, orange, yellow, green, blue purple).  Add the eyeballs and beak. We added legs in yellow folded accordian style, and then feet cut out in orange. Older kids could cut out their own feet. I did 3 rectangular shaped toes on the orange feet.

My Class (minus a few who don’t want to be in pictures) with their Construction Paper Turkeys for Thanksgiving! 

Here are our finished colorful Thanksgiving Turkeys! Gobble Gobble!
Then we wrote what we are thankful for this year, after doing a whole class brainstorm on the board. The kindergarten kids wrote 4 things each, that they were thankful for, and they all had to start with the sight word “MY” for practice. We came up with things like “My home, my friends, my dog, my cat, my mom, my dad, my family, my video games, my dolls”. HERE is some cute Stationery to write on. It is below and is free.

I love this Veggie Turkey for Thanksgiving Day. Isn’t it so cute? Gotta try it! 

 I found the cute printables for many kinds of writing projects for Thanksgiving. I loved them all. The link is HERE at TPT on Debbie Palacios site.

Happy Thanksgiving Everybody! 
Gobble Gobble! 

Lastly we played some Pilgrim and Pumpkin Roll and Cover games HERE at TPT.  I loved this one with the Old Lady Who Swallowed “Too Much Turkey and Pumpkin Pie” for Thanksgiving. It has a really cute visual for adding up 2 dice. It is HERE at Mrs. Lirettes Learning Blog. My kids LOVED playing it during center time. Have a nice Thanksgiving Holiday everyone! Gobble Gobble.

A Funny Story and Ugly Sweater Parties

Friday in my class we were doing turkeys for art. I was listening to the chit chat at one of the all-boy tables. It was quite hysterical. I just HAD to share the funny banter.  This is what it is like being a teacher. It will tickle your funny bone!

Downtown at Abravenal Hall to see the genius comic “Jim Gaffigan, Dad is FAT” show. 

“Hey Mrs. Moss did you know my mom is pregnant?” another child rebuts with “Hey MY dad is the President!!” another child “YOUR dad is American?” another child “My dad is the judge!” Another child says “Hey, but MY dad works at McDonalds, I saw him there when I was a little kid!” Everything went silent for a few seconds while the kids pondered that revelation…..

Funny Monkey stocking I saw yesterday at Hobby Lobby. It just cracked me up! I love Christmas stockings for kids. I’d buy a new set every year if I could! 

. I just HAD to stop and write it all down. 1 minute of kinder kid discussion and wit.  Unbelievable. These kids could be doing stand up comedy! They all stopped in awe of the lucky McDonald’s kid. Tee Hee. Oh this made me chuckle today! And #McDonalds, take note!

I was dinkin’ around Hobby Lobby yesterday and these ugly sweater party invitations and decorations caught my eye. HOW FUN IS THAT?!?  I want to have an Ugly Sweater Par-tay! I have plenty of them to decide between, that’s FOR SURE! (And I could dress the hubs up funny too, lol.)
Ugly Sweaters are the BOMB! I Agree! 
Cute Snowman in his ugly sweater holding your cookies for your Ugly Sweater Party… tee hee. Gotta Love it! 
Me and the hubs enjoyin’ life and laughing our guts out with Jim Gaffigan last week. Happy Holidays!!  And Happy Ugly Sweater Parties one and all!

Sight Word Lists – Make a Rainbow

Here is the Sight Word Rainbow for our class to use to see who is learning all their Kindergarten sight words from the list. I put the words in a listing order from easy to harder with some color words sprinkled in. Most of these words make up the 50 most used words in Children’s Literature. So it is super smart to memorize them for reading fluency.

Class Sight Word Rainbow. Add your “sun” with YOUR name on it as soon as you learn the words in List 1.  (is, it, in, on, no, of, us, as, an am, at, the). Each list has 12 words for 72 total. 

If you help your kids learn these words, they will become better readers. It is plain and simple. Sight words are words that are harder to sound out and are better learned my rote memorization.

We have 5 kids so far that have put their “sun” up on the red part of the rainbow, having memorized the first word list of 2 letter words and THE. The words are listed on the back of the homework folder in 5 lists. These kids won a red piece of licorice. Let’s see how many we can get up on the rainbow by Thanksgiving!

Math Add and Subtract Mats and Counters

My friend Kim Metcalf gave me some really cute ideas for making up couting bins for fast finishers.
I made up a few and use them daily instead and hand each one out to a table of 4-5 kids during math time so they can use them in their counting.  They love them! 

The first one is a gumball machine and pom pom counters. Here at Mrs. Byrds Kinder  is a cute gumball machine to use with some Walmart pom poms as a counter mat and counters for kindergarten or first grade.

The kids love when it is their turn to use the colorful pom poms! 

Gumball math mat with pom poms for the gumballs! 

 Byrd’s Kinder had a cute gumball machine I shrunk and made up 6 for a center table. AND it’s a great idea to use later for a behavior motivator for some of my harder kiddos. I would just shrink it a bit more and use dot stickers. 
Birthday Cake math mat with counters made from Dollar Store birthday candles (80 for $1.00!) I got the math mat blackline HERE at Activity Village. They also had some free math downloads that were cute on the birthday cake theme. 

The Fabulous First Grade website had some cute candy corn math activities you could add for fun to these candy corn counters. I just used a black haunted house for these and sometimes used dried lima beans one side spray painted orange. Fun for October. Maybe some haystacks with candy corn for November? 

I’m going to try pizzas next and cut up felt pieces for the counters shaped like pepperoni, sausage, tomatoes, olives etc. I’ll post the pictures when I get it done.

Another one I made was a T-shirt with colorful buttons. I made my t-shirts out of colorful felt. A printable t-shirt is HERE. The buttons I bought are HERE at Amazon.
ROYLCO R2131 Bright Buttons, Assorted Sizes, Shapes and Color, 1/2-Pound

I found a free printable ladybug to use with my black dry beans as a counting mat. It is HERE at the Measured Mom. I got the dry, black beans at the market.
 
Kindergarten math mats to use with black bean counters.

Then another one  was a bin of tiny shells I’ve had for many years. I used sandpaper and blue foam shaped like a “fishbowl” for the mats. I’m trying to decide which ones the kids like better. I hope they are careful with my little shells!

 Sandpaper and blue foam fishbowl math mats with shell counters.

 I don’t know which ones the kids like better so I made a few of each.

Here is the Christmas tree and the Ladybug mats. I just backed them with red cardstock and laminated. I must have forgotten to take a pic of the Hobby Lobby Christmas doo dads. They were only $1.99 for a package of about 60 little ornaments. 

The kids’ favorite this week was a new one I just put out for Christmas, since we go off track in less than 2 weeks they won’t get to use it for long. It is a Christmas tree. The mat is HERE. Then I went over to Hobby Lobby and found a package of Christmas colorful foam pieces that looked like ornaments and candy for the counters. They are super cute. The kids LOVE them.

This mat is from Prekinders.com

The last counters I bought have a space theme and then I found Christmas Checkers. I haven’t figure out what to do with either of these yet. Still thinking of a cute mat. Any ideas?

I found a snowflake mat that might work for these chips. I can also use some tiny foam snowflakes for it. It is HERE at Prekinders. I printed off page 11 that had “10 snowflakes” and we can use addends of 10 to count with on this mat.  There are many other “grid” counting mats that I liked HERE.  I can use my shells with sandbucket counting mats or white pom poms with snowman grid counting mats. I know the kiddos will love them!

 Red and green checkers from the dollar store had 32 in each bag. Great chunky counters for little fingers. I laminated the checkerboard so maybe that will work for a counting mat?

I found a cute “space” mat for these glow in the dark shapes HERE at coloring hub.  I printed the coloring page on gray cardstock and laminated them. It is a cute mat. 

These glow in the dark stars were a dollar store item too. I thought maybe just some black foam might work as the “night sky” counting mat? Here was lots of space coloring pages. I found one that had a planet, and a rocket that might work.

Now I just need to get some little containers for all my counting mat junk!! Anybody have any suggestions here? Maybe just some Rubbermaid tubs?

Frozen Finger Puppets from Felt

I have 5 granddaughters who all LOVE FROZEN, the movie. So when I saw some patterns for some cute, little, finger puppets of all of the characters, I knew we had to make them! I went out and bought about $7.00 worth of felt squares of every color. I looked at this picture I saw on Facebook From The Idea Room and then I freehanded the puppets. It was pretty easy to also embellish with glitter, sequins, buttons and gems. And we made little faces out of fine, Sharpie markers.

All the Frozen Characters; Anna, Elsa, Olaf, Hans, Kristoff and Sven.
Sven the Moose? Oops. I guess he’s a reindeer. My bad. 
We kept laughing at ourselves for putting what we called a “spork” on her head with felt. haha. Then we added glitter and a little earring and glittery button to her outfit. And Tiff got out her makeup and dabbed on some real blush. 
Elsa and Anna Finger Dolls from Frozen were the most fun to make of all the characters. We added eyelashes to the wiggly eyes. 
Olaf was super funny. Wendy came up with the design and made all the Olaf puppets for the girls. I crafted Hans and Kristoff adding a few little sequins for buttons. Tiff did all the hair and cut out just about all those clothes. Then we had an assembly line going with the glue gun. The girls picked out the buttons and beads and embellishments they wanted. 
I know we’ll be playing with these for a long time. I think Dylan just tolerated all the “dolls”. He would have rather had some Hot Wheels cars instead I think. lol. Tiff was nice enough to let us all come over and mess up her pretty house making crafts. Thanks Tiff. 
Frozen Finger Puppets made from Felt. Super Easy and so fun. I found these little Frozen tiny lunch box tins for the girls to keep the dolls in. They were at the Target Dollar section. I should have bought more of them. I found these cute playing cards there too. Only a buck! 
Frozen little Lunchpail tin mini with Frozen playing cards. We’ll keep the dolls in the tins. I scored these at the Target Dollar section. The tin was $3 and the cards were $1. 
Frozen Fingerpuppet patterns. 
Our Frozen Felt Finger Puppet patterns. I’ll make these into a PDF today after school. 
Here we all are after our FROZEN Finger puppets were all made! That was a fun crafting afternoon with almost all my granddaughters there.  

 Then one of the girls got out her mini boombox and they all started singing “Let It Go” together. It was pretty much like every other one you’ve seen on youtube. Funny only to us, probably. Lots of  pretty, off key singing while we were all laughing.

My granddaughters were two of millions who donned the Elsa and Anna costumes this Halloween. At my school there were dozens of them in every classroom! It was the MOST popular costume I’d seen in years! 
Frozen Trunk or Treating! Aren’t they just super cute? 

Family Shopping.com had some cute Frozen banners I liked with Olaf in the middle, great for a FROZEN kiddie party! It would be fun to have one in the dead of Utah Winter wouldn’t it? Maybe some little, powdered donut snowmen and hot chocolate in ice blue mugs with marshmallows?

For future crafts we will be making beaded bracelets in the Frozen colors of light and dark blue and pinkish purple and white. I got these cute charms to put in between the beads from Oriental Trading. The multicolor snowflake charms come in a package of 36 for $7.00. I think these will be awesome and sweet!