The Very Hungry Caterpillar and the letter C...Continued

Today I was reminded of one of the finer aspects of teaching from home. Callen had been up all night cutting his first tooth (which I was so excited to finally start to see it peek through) so when Kaitlyn walked into my room this morning and said, " Mommy I want to snuggle I don't feel good" I was so glad that my answer could be yes...we had no place we had to be and so she climbed into my bed and we snuggled all morning :) It made me one happy mama! So school started a little late for us today more like lunch time. Today we finished up our lesson on the letter C. We reviewed the letters we have learned previously (A, K and C) and practiced writing on her dry erase board. She is getting much better at tracing the letters.

We started today off with our first activity a Hungry caterpillar necklace. This activity really challenged her fine motor skills and introduced patterning. It also helped her to retell the story of the very hungry Caterpillar which she did so very proudly tonight at bedtime.

First let's start with the prep work. This past weekend we made dyed pasta noodles these are great for counting, sorting and making pattern necklaces. First you get some pasta noodles and shape size will do, then you put them in a ziploc bag with a splash of rubbing alcohol, add a few drops of food coloring and close the bag. Have your little one swirl the coloring and the noodles around till they are all coated. Set them on wax paper to dry over night. The next day they will be ready for patterns :)

 The Very Hungry Caterpillar Story Necklace

So that brings us to this afternoon.....Kaitlyn and I reread the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, she helped me with the counting, we reviewed the days of the week. And we talked about the colors we saw in the story. When we were all done I gave her the Caterpillar coloring page, found in our Printables section I showed her how to stay in the lines and focus on coloring. At one point I was talking to her and she said.."Shh! mommy I am trying to focus on my colors!" Gotta love her :) So she matched each color up to the color in the book before she started coloring on her paper. When she was all done I cut them all out while she played with her color puzzle, and other color games we have been using this week. I also put a small hole punch in each little piece of food and two on the caterpillar. Next we tied her string to the end of a small bucket so her pieces wouldn't fall off. We added one piece of pasta and then 1 piece of food from the story ( we worked backwords starting with the slice of watermelon and eventually ending at the apple) We followed a pattern when adding the noodles, going through each color. the food pieces were to delicate for her to put on so I did those and she did most of the pasta....she worked hard using her fine motor skills to thread each piece onto her pasta, there were quite a few so I helped in between so she wouldn't get burned out. When we finally added all of the food we put the caterpillar on last. Now we were all done with her Very Hungry Caterpillar Story necklace! She could now use the necklace to retell the entire story of The Hungry Caterpillar!

Patternpillars

So our next activity we practiced our pattern making, first with the colored noodles and then with some red and green pom poms, we talked about ABAB patterns and ABBABB patterns. Kaitlyn quickly got the hang of it and was rocking right along. After we were done we use the pom poms to make her very own hungry caterpillar she could keep in her bug collecting jar (mason jar). I much rather prefer the pom pom critters to the live ones :)

Color Games

Kaitlyn put together this puzzle all week naming the colors and practicing her spatial awareness by completing it....It's a lot harder than it looks. I also too some crayon cutouts I had and made a little game you can find items like this at Trend or your local teacher store. I spread out several colors of crayons and I would call out a color and she would have to put it in the crayon box. I introduced the concept of shades ( light, dark and combined colors like red-orange etc.)

The C Page

This is our C page for our ABC book we started it on Monday and just finished it today. I cut out the circles from her salt painting and then drew a letter C onto her tissue paper circles. She aligned the circles onto it and then we added the finishing touches of the eyes and the antennae ( pipe cleaners)

Here is our finished unit on the letter C