ABC Stuff: E Stuff

At the end of the week, I'm not sure we have the short E sound, largely because Talmage refers to elephants as uh-fa-lents, so when he remembered that that was the word I was sounding out, E made the sound uh-uh-uh.

Elmo Loves You is a fantastic book for short E sounds, largely because Elmo refers to himself exclusively in the third person. Other short E sound books were hard to come by, but What the Elephant Told by Barbara Brenner and Ella the Elegant Elephant by Carmela and Steven D'Amico, though a little long, worked well too.

Activities

Easter Eggs

We are going to dye Easter eggs with my family later this week, so we decided to do something a little different for our activity. We started by blowing the eggs (poke holes in both ends with a pin and blow out the egg inside) and then did a variety of decorations.

We tried to tie-dye the eggs by placing the eggs in a colander and then dripping vinegar on them. We then dripped some food coloring on the eggs and rolled them around in the colander. In the end, the eggs looked like your standard dyed eggs.

We weren't quite ready for our craft to end, so we went a little wild. What says Easter better than yarn, buttons, and feathers?

Easter egg patterns.

Yeah, the idea for this was better than the project. But now that the project that never ends is finally made, I'm glad I've got it.

I've been trying to think of how to insert math into this project, and Talmage has a hard time with patterns (you know, red, green, blue, red, green ,what comes next (Talmage's likely response would be "Purple!")). I thought since it's difficult to think of short E activities, this might be a good time to use this one.

I tied it into E Stuff by making oval eggs. I'll insert the picture here. I made the document 8.5 x 11, so I think you can print directly from the picture onto a sheet of paper.

I copied the eggs onto different colors of paper and then laminated them. (Well, that's what I decided to do after several attempts to make them flannel board figures and failed miserably. Then I thought, "Is this project more effective is you can stick them on flannel?" And I decided no.)

That's it. Now we can make a variety of patterns. This might be a good sacrament meeting activity.

Elephant Puppet

Maybe this summer while I'm being a single mother Talmage and I will make a puppet theater so we can use all our puppets. Hmmm.

Painted the paper bag gray (Talmage is getting really good at color theory and mixing colors). Then I used this template for elephant parts. I thought we might put some ribbons in their hair, but Talmage informed me that they are boy elephants. Clearly.

The Elves and the Shoemaker.

The printable colorable book was available at this site. I then printed the accompanying shoes on cardstock and we learned how to lace shoes.