I've officially survived my second week into our EAK school year and with 2-3 days of rain and being stuck indoors has me with a sense of cabin fever! I'm so thankful for this 3-day weekend, which is giving me the chance to relax and recharge before heading back and into our third week!
This past week my class has been working hard on identifying the letter M! We've explored the moon and yesterday we read the popular story, If You Gave a Moose a Muffin by Laura Numeroff.
Moose Craftivity
One of the crafts my kiddos completed were these "M is for moose" handprints. During their rest time I called students back to trace their foot. Once I had those cut out I called them again to paint their hands brown and make these adorable antlers. I'm so happy with how well they each came out and quite proud of myself for getting it done without the help of an assistant!
Afterwards I invited them during their centers time to finalize their project with a tracing of the letter M. I quickly realized that when giving them practice handwriting pages they weren't confident enough to create letters on their own. So, I used a handwriting page I plan on using next week underneath the paper to help assist them in forming their letters. The final piece looks great and I love that each one looks a little different from another.
Muffin Counting
To finish off our story I found this super adorable (and easy to prep!) craft that incorporates counting and writing numbers. I was pleased to see that my littles had a good understanding of counting!
To make these I made a simple muffin template and used it as a stencil to make the others. I folded brown paper and stapled them together so when I cut out the template I could make multiples quickly - I then made a yellow template for the muffin wrapping. I verbally directed my students step-by-step on how to glue the pieces together. Afterwards I gave each table dot paints to create their blackberries.
I modeled that I was thinking of a number 1-10 only and helped direct them to using their name tags where I had the numbers 1-10 printed. I modeled how to use my finger to count each number 1:1 and when I landed on the number I wanted for my blackberries I would copy that onto my paper.
Again, I was impressed that many of my students correctly counted their dots and saw many of them using their name tags to copy the form of their desired number.
