Yertle the Turtle & Wacky Wednesday

We finished up our Dr. Seuss unit today and I have a few ideas to share with you. We read Yertle the Turtle.

The kids really liked this story! They felt bad for poor Mack at the bottom of the pile. And of course, when he burped there was a room full of giggles! For the craft, I cut out a "flattened" turtle shape for the kids to color.

I cut them from card stock so they'd be sturdy because I wanted them to stand on their own. I was lucky enough to find a blue egg carton in our storage room (a much lighter blue than the turtles in the book, but a blue nonetheless) and cut it apart to make the shells. I ended up just taping the egg cup to the paper and it held up great. I bent the legs down and they became the cutest little turtles!

And of course, to go along with the story, we tried to see how many we could stack. This didn't work very well because the bottoms were now flat from the paper, but we did manage to get 4 on top of each other.

Every time we added a fifth, the stack would come tumbling down! There were a lot of kids holding their breath when it came time to add the fifth one! So fun!
We also had Wacky Wednesday, in honor of the book by the same name. (Although it's not a true Dr. Seuss book, I did explain to the kids that it was written by the same man using a different name.)

The kids dressed a little crazy!

The book is filled with silly things that the kids have to find on every page, so for art they drew their own wacky pictures. Then they shared them with the class so we could all find the silly things.

Multiple suns was a common one, as well as floating things, like cars and trees.

See the silly thing in this picture above, besides the suns? The man is driving a tractor with his feet backwards! My kiddos are so creative, I gotta love 'em.

Daisy-Head Mayzie

We are celebrating Dr. Seuss books this week! Today's was Daisy-Head Mayzie, which I have never read before. It's a wonderful book!

As you can probably tell from the title and picture, it's about a little girl who has a daisy growing out of the top of her head! So today we made daisy headbands.

I couldn't resist putting my headband on the Operation guy. We studied our bodies last week and this was still left out on my desk. So cute! Anyway, I cut green construction paper up like this:

One thin strip and then I cut the remaining paper in half. I wasn't perfect with my cutting. No ruler lines here! The bigger sections are for the grass and the little strip was added to the back so it fit on a child's head. If you use large construction paper, you might not need to add a strip. Also, this gave me two grass sections per paper, but only one strip so I had to cut a few more strips from another piece. Make sense? Anyway, the kids used scissors to make a fringe along the paper.

I told them they could just do one cut for each blade of grass. You know, cut and move over, cut and move over, and so on. But because their scissors are so much smaller than mine, the grass slits weren't very long. So I ended up cutting off part of the paper so the headband wouldn't be this big wall of green paper with a little fringe on top. It would look more like grass. So in hindsight, I could have easily cut the construction paper into thirds, and then cut the extra strips from another piece.
When the grass was done, they moved onto their flowers. I decided to let the kids make any kind of flower they wanted using any color of paper. (It's just more fun that way!) But this is also where it got a little difficult for them. I wanted them to draw their own flower and then cut it out. But they really struggled with it. A few kids drew very complicated flowers, with lots of petals, and then had a hard time cutting them out. So we kind of compromised. I said either I could draw a simple flower for them and they could cut it out, or they could draw the flower and I would cut it out. That seemed to work much better.

When the flower was done, they added a middle and a stem, using pipe cleaners and sparkly pom poms that were sent to me from CraftProjectIdeas.com.

I also let the kids pick any color stem they wanted, instead of just using the green. So they picked their pipe cleaner and I cut off the bottom third and they used that piece to make a leaf.

We used glue dots to attach the pom pom to the middle of the flower. Then I stapled a strip of green paper to their grass and taped on the flower so it would be at the back of their head.

Then I measured their heads and stapled the other side appropriately. If the flower drooped a little, I just made the stem shorter and re-taped it.

At first, only the girls made one.

But after I lined them up to take their picture, a few boys came over to the art table. Yay!

Valentine Bags and Heart Links

I wanted to quickly show you the bags we made to hold our valentines. We started it last week during our dental health unit. I traced hearts onto white paper and put out red, pink and purple paint. The kids dipped toothbrushes into the paint and flicked the bristles to make the paint splatter onto their heart.

This didn't work as well as I thought it would. I tried adding water, but that just made it drip big globs of paint. Maybe our brushes were too old or something. We had one brush that worked great, but the others were very hard to work with. But the kids enjoyed it, so that's all that matters. When they were dry I cut them out and wrote their names on them. Then I taped them onto bags that I bought at Party City.

And then, to decorate it even more, we used some foam stickers that I got from CraftProjectIdeas.com.

 The kids loved the glitter ones.

 We pretended those purses were padlocks, keeping our valentines safe!

Here is the valentine I made for my kids:

I wanted it to be something they could read themselves, so I used a wiggle eye, a heart gem and used glitter glue to make the U. I attached it to a kaleidoscope that I found at Party City.
Another thing I wanted to share with you are these heart links I found at Target. They were in the valentine section, not the dollar spot. They were $3 and had 60 in a pack. We've been using them all week, to make patterns,

practice counting (using a die to tell us how many links to add to the chain),

sort them by color using what I like to call "robotic claws,"

and play tic-tac-toe. My kids are really into this game lately.

We haven't had any break yet, so I'm pretty happy with them. And they really are pretty, too!
Happy Valentine's Day!

Handful of Love

I found this neat idea for a Valentine's Day card at Preschool Playbook. But I saw it too late and my kids had already made cards for their parents. So I tweaked it a bit and decided to have the kids make it for a bulletin board display. First I traced their hands and they colored them in with crayons.

Then they cut out a heart that I had drawn on construction paper.

After I cut out their handprint, they glued it to the heart.

Then I used glue dots to attach a heart-shaped Dove chocolate to the middle of the hand.

I hung them all in the hall with the title, A Handful of Love.

The kids keep asking when I'm going to send them home so they can eat the chocolate!

Sweet Tooth (and a Frog Treat)

To finish up our dental health week, I made "toothpaste" by mixing tempera paint with shaving cream.

It was nice and fluffy! The kids used toothbrushes to brush giant teeth that I had cut out.

I did not add any glue, so this isn't puffy paint. For the most part, it dried flat. But they looked so pretty with the Valentine's colors they used, I decided to call them Sweet Teeth.

And on an unrelated note, one of my kids brought in a birthday treat. FROGS!

It's an Oreo cookie sitting on two pretzels, all covered in what I think was white chocolate tinted green. It had candy eyes and a strawberry fruit snack for a tongue. How cute is that?

And it was so good!

Say Cheese!

Our theme this week is dental health. A couple years ago I had the kids paint a big mouth and glue mini marshmallows on for teeth. This year I decided it would be cute if the kids painted a self-portrait with an extra big head and smile, and then glue on the marshmallows. They used watercolors to paint their picture. I reminded them that they needed to have a big, open mouth in order to fit the marshmallows.

Then they dipped the mini marshmallows in glue and put them in their mouths -- on their portrait, that is!

And I was right! These turned out so cute!

HA! I hung them up with the caption, "Show me your pearly whites!"

They make me smile every time I see them. Especially that first one I shared with you.

Love it!