Preschool Mommy

The idea here is that you are making simple bird feeders, while working on the children's fine motor skills by having them thread Cheerios onto yarn. This sounds simple, but like everything involving children... it is not as simple as it seems. :)

Here's what you'll need:

• Colorful yarn
• Cheerios
  
• Small bells
• Glue

The important part is the preparation. You will need to cut the thread to the length you want, and tie the bell onto one end. The bells provide a stopper for the Cheerios, and are supposed to jingle if a bird picks at the string. Here's where it gets tricky. Most yarn is just too soft and thick for little fingers to thread a Cheerio onto. Either you will need to be careful to buy stiff thread or maybe twine, or you can do what I did. I applied school glue to the ends of the strings - rubbing it in with my fingers - then hung the strings up to dry. Once the glue was dry the ends of the strings were hard enough to act as needles for the children to thread the Cheerios onto. Also, you have to make sure you are using "real" Cheerios. The cheap generic brands tend not to have regular sized holes which can create frustration for the children.

Once you have everything prepared, the actual activity is super easy. I took the kids outside so I could leave it to the squirrels and birds to clean up any mess. I placed bowls of Cheerios in the center of the tables, and let them thread as many as they wanted onto the string. Once finished, we hung them on a tree outside our classroom window so we could see if any birds ate from our feeders.

This is a project to help improve the children's motor skills (cutting , folding , gluing, and stapling), but even more so, it is meant as a literacy activity. Through this project the children created their own books with pictures, and told stories to accompany the images. This is a tall order for three year olds, but the children proved once again that they are capable of doing amazing things with just a little bit of scaffolding.

My kids are still in the early stages of representational drawing, and I really wanted to work on their cutting skills, so I made this animal sheet. It has a number of animals for them to choose from, they just have to follow the lines with the scissors to cut them out. I made it this way because they have a tendency to snip around the edge of the page, and I wanted them to start cutting through the paper.

Click here to download the animal cutting sheet

All of the images were downloaded for free online.*

Next, I helped the children fold two pices of paper and staple them on the fold to create a book. They pasted the cut-out images, one to each page, in the book. I placed wax paper between the pages to keep them from sticking together. Once the glue was dried, the children could color the images.

Finally, I asked the children to name their books and tell me stories based on the pictures that were inside. I was very impressed with their stories, and wrote them on the inside of their books. Here is an example of one of the the books.

The child wrote:
Cow is moo.
Duck is quacking, and dog is ruffing.
And the elephant is swinging his trunk, and the seal is going in the water.



There is another story one of the children wrote:
My giraffe reaches out his neck and get leaves,
and my seal swims.
My snake does climb to trees and he goes like this on the ground (acted out :) )
Doggie licks and we pet him.
My turtle's my friend too.

I had another one who sang all of Old Mac Donald, and another who named her snake lion and her gorilla princess, and said they liked to play games on the computer. :)

All of them were original and soo cute. This activity is definitely a keeper.

One caveat....
I gave myself 2 days for this project, but it took much longer. I still haven't gotten all of the children to dictate stories to go along with their books, but most have. I would reccomend that you give youself a couple weeks to work on this while doing smaller daily activies.

*Web sites

• http://animalspiictures.blogspot.com/2010/08/animal-coloring-pages.html
• http://www.coloringpagestube.com/
• http://www.craftsandcoloringpages.com/free-printable-coloring/
• http://www.911coloringpagestoprint.com/
• http://www.coloringpageskingdom.co
• http://animalspiictures.blogspot.com/2010/08/animal-coloring-pages.html
• http://www.kidsandcolors.com/coloring-page-44.html
• http://thecoloringspot.com/animals/animals-set-9.html
• http://www.eprintablecoloringpages.com
• http://www.kidsandcolors.com/
• http://www.tiptopglobe.com/f
• http://www.coloringpages1001.com/coloring-pages/giraffe/

It was really simple. I set up a couple tents, some stuffed animals, and some pillows; and the kids came to school dressed in their PJ's, with their favorite stuffed animal, and maybe a pillow or blanket.





Unfortunately my T/TH class got the raw end of the deal on this. The bears hardly budged the entire class. All they could see was a big brown mass. The MWF class got a number of great views of the bears though so I think the other guys were just unlucky. I'll try to put it on for them again sometime.

This is a project we did as part of a unit on winter and polar animals.

To create the template, I took the picture I found of a teddy bear outline, (http://twistynoodle.com) inserted it into word, and wrote "My polar bear's name is.." underneath it.

For the class... I gave the children just the glue and the template to start off, and I showed them how to cover the entire inside of the template with the glue. Next, we used medium sized cotton balls to stick to the glue. Once most of them were finished, I talked to the group about what the bear was missing. With a little encouragement they figured out that he needed eyes, a nose, and a mouth. I then set out some plates with various materials on them: cut pieces of string, buttons, pom poms, and googly eyes, and let the kids go for it.

I got the printout for this on Makinglearningfun.com. The idea is the same. You place the number of goldfish crackers on the penguins belly to match the number on its fin. However, I wrote the number on its belly instead, and placed dots in specific spots on the numbers. Why did I do this? Well... as a child I remember being very frustrated when I was told that I couldn't count on my fingers so I developed my own system of counting on the actual numbers. This was something that helped me immensely as a child, and something I would like to pass on to my students. You see, by counting on the numbers the children are connecting the physical amount that the number represents to the numeric symbol. My hope is that this will help them to identify numbers, count using numbers, and as one parent pointed out, in the future write numbers.

Here is the sheet I made:

I told them we were feeding the penguins, and the the penguins needed the number of crackers listed on their bellies. I made sure to that the children were counting the fish as they placed them on the dots. The children really took to this activity. It might have been the fact that they got to eat the goldfish once they finished :)