K Stuff

Want to throw a curve ball at your toddler? Teach him that K makes the same sound as C.

Since the last several letters have been less common letters, I've adopted the approach of searching the library catalog for specific words when looking for books. For K books, I searched kiss, kangaroo, koala, and kitten and came up with several great books.

Activities

Kite



No big project here. Cut a paper into a diamond shape, attached yarn for a string, let Talmage decorate it. Done and done.

Three Little Kittens.

I thought this was a fantastic project. Talmage found it a bit less fantastic. It was a little long and took us two days.

First, I printed three copies of this template and this template on white paper. I let Talmage color those as he wished and assembled and then laminated the kittens. Then I printed this template on three colors of paper, two copies of each color (for a total of six copies). I cut the paws out of three separate colors and laminated those and then "dirtied" the other three paws and laminated those.

I put sandpaper on the back of the kittens and velcro on the kittens paws with the other side of velcro on the colored paws, or mittens. We then acted out the poem "Three Little Kittens."

Insert video here.

Kangaroo Puppet



We got the template for the head and joey here and the arms and pouch here. I took the website's suggestion and folded in the flaps of the bag to make the head more triangular.

The joey in the pouch was particularly fun.

Treasure hunt. kangaroo, kite, key, kid, kitten. The treat was KitKat bar.

J Stuff

The best book we found was One, Two, Three, Jump! by Penelope Lively.

Activities

Jellyfish.



I got the idea for this from several different sites (google jellyfish craft) and kind of made up my own. I took a styrofoam cup and poked two holes on the top. I strung yarn so I could hang the fish. Talmage then affixed tissue paper squares of various colors to the cups and we then hung strips of tissue paper to the mouth of the cup. I also included strips of plastic (from a Ziploc bag) so it would have some sheen, but I think those just disappeared.

Jack O'Lantern.



Do you know how hard it is to find pumpkins in May? Very hard.

Talmage's friend Benji came over and we decided to make paper Jack O' Lanterns. They both embraced a Picasso like approach to faces. After we did the pumpkins, we moved on to bats, ghosts, spiders, and sea monsters. The boys hung up the pictures as decorations and got in costume. Talmage was a dinosaur. Benji was a king. We had prettytend Halloween.

Unfortunately, I again failed to figure out Tyler's camera.

Jet.



The above picture is missing a tail fin because this picture was taken several days and several crashes after we made it. We printed off the template from this website, cut out the pattern, and traced it on a styrofoam tray, the kind meat comes on (well cleaned). After cutting the pieces out of styrofoam, we simply put the pieces together and painted it. Note that tempera paint doesn't work; acrylic will do the trick.

Treasure hunt. jacket, jack o'lantern, jelly, jar, jellyfish, jewelry, juice. The treasure was Junior Mints.

I Stuff

We checked out Hank Finds Inspiration by Craig Frazier for H Stuff last week. Because we hadn't been to the library yet, it served double duty. It was an okay H book but a phenomenal I book!

Other great I books? I Wanna Iguana by Karen Kaufman Orloff, Why Mosquitos Buzz in People's Ears by Verna Aardman, Imogene's Antlers by David Small, and Isabelle and the Angel by Thierry Magnier. What a great week for books!

Activities

What's that? A wedding cake? A volcano? A teepee? A tower? A beehive? A tholos tomb? No, it's an Igloo.



Compare the above picture with the one on the Family Fun website:



Then read Family Fun's instructions here and let me know what I lost in translation.

Iguana.



Here are the instructions. Our craft store didn't have all the necessary Woodsies, so we simplified and improvised. Talmage thought plain old green was a little boring, so he added several purple iguana tattoos.

Insects. (I cheated and did butterflies).



I originally saw this idea on TV for coffee filter butterflies, but I did the activity before I could go to the store and buy coffee filters, so I improvised. I think they turned out pretty cute.

We talked about what insects are and identified ants, mosquitos, bugs, and butterflies as insects. (I'm pretty sure a bug in his head is a fly.) Then we took a sheet of paper and painted it with watercolors. I dripped water on mine and sprinkled it with salt. We then accordion folded the paper and fastened a pipe cleaner around the middle. After we fanned out the "wings." We made a paper plate mobile out of the butterflies and hung it up in Tal's room.

Instrument.



Pretty simple. I saw this at the craft store when I was buying things for the iguana. It cost about two dollars. We painted it.

Treasure hunt. inside, igloo, iguana, infant, itchy. The treasure was Mike and Ike's. I know, it doesn't start with a short I sound; I'll take suggestions for alternatives.

H Stuff

H week was pretty fun. I randomly had a lot of ideas for this week, which made it fun. Books were actually kind of tricky. These are the best we found: The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear by Don and Audrey Wood, Dream Hop by Julia Durango, and Hank Finds Inspiration by Craig Frazier.

Activities.

Hippo Puppet.

To continue with the paper bag puppet theme, we made hippo puppets. These were a little different (and inferior in my opinion) because they didn't have mouths that opened and closed. But we colored them instead of painted them, which was a fun turn of events. Here is the template for the head (to be glued on the flap) and here is the template for the body (to be glued on the bag part, just under the flap).

Heart Attack. I am a photography idiot, and I took pictures of this with Tyler's camera without a chip in the camera.

Pretty simple. We cut multi-colored hearts out and I let Talmage and our friend Benji who was over that day decorate them. They mostly used crayons, but I had our usual craft bling--feathers, googly eyes, buttons, and poof balls. We then gave Daddy a "heart attack" and attacked all the doors upstairs with hearts to celebrate Daddy's first day of the LPP program. I envisioned them on the bedroom door, but Talmage wanted a wider ranging heart attack.

This is the heart Talmage made for himself that day. You'll note an abundance of googly eyes.

Hand Painting.

This was really fun and really messy. I rolled out butcher paper in the driveway and we dipped our hands in paint and made prints on the paper. My original vision had us placing our prints in a circle, but Talmage of course got a little more creative and branched out.

Mental note: I need to get an old sheet for driveway paint projects. There are a few green footprints in front of our house now. Oh well. It's washable paint.

Hat (the newspaper variety).

These are the instructions I followed. Originally I thought I would buy a visor from the craft store and we'd decorate it. If I have a girl, that might be fun. This was nice and simple though.

Hungry Hungry Hippos. The game. We played it.

H treasure hunt. house, hot dog, hammer, hair, hat, hanger. Treasure was Heath bar.

G Stuff

G proved to be our most difficult letter yet; we had a hard time shaking the soft G sound. Also, the funky swirly lowercase G that some fonts use was almost unrecognizable to a 3 year old. I'm a little behind in posting this, so I can't remember all the good G books we did. Grown ups Get to Do All the Driving by William Steig was one.

Activities

Go Fish. The game. We learned it. It wasn't as successful as Uno, our current game of choice. (See here.)

Two-faced gorillas.



The template for this is here. I printed the yellow side on yellow paper rather than coloring it. We painted the black side black and left the smile white. Googly eyes for that googly effect. I tried to pull a child's psychology "Let's talk about our feelings" activity by asking Talmage what makes him sad and what makes him happy, but he just had fun making funny faces.

Shape Goose.

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Here's the template. This was kind of fun because the goose is made up of different shapes. Talmage knows his shapes pretty well, but it was a good review.

Giacometti Figures.

Okay, if I'm honest, we didn't do these for G week due to the soft G sound. But we did do this this week and I thought we should document it.

We made the base of the figures with pipe cleaners, heads with paper balls, and then covered them with tin foil. Had we used putty for the feet, they would have stood up.

G treasure hunt. garden, grass, glass, glue, glasses. The treasure was Mr. Goodbar.

F Stuff

Now that I'm a year into this project and I'm doing phoenetic sounds like FR and FL, I realized that I did F all wrong. Frame, frog, and flag belong in a later week. Remember this next time.

I found great F books. Fancy Nancy by Jane O'Conner and The Foot Book by Dr. Seuss were perfect. Ugly Fish by Kara LaReau was excellent for Fs, but the plot line (where a fish doesn't want to share his tank, so he eats all the peppy fish who are put in there with him) was a bit alarming for a toddler. Talmage's review? "I don't want to be swallowed."

Activities

Frame.

When I went to the craft store to stock up a couple of weeks ago I found a wooden frame for about 99 cents. Perfect.

Talmage painted and decorated it. And I did a good job letting go of creative control. I think it turned out rather well.



Frog.



To continue our paper bag puppet theme, I found a frog. Here is the template, but I'm sure you could improvise one just as easily.

Flag.



This may have been Talmage's favorite activity yet because of the stickers involved. White paper. We glued red stripes on. Blue square. And all the star stickers you want!

Family ABC book.





I stole this idea from my sister-in-law Sarah. I spent WAY too much time scrapbooking papers with each of the letters of the alphabet. Then we glued on a picture of someone in our family whose name started with that letter. We included grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and immediate family. Maquel, I would like to suggest you name your twins Ursula and Veronica.

Wheeler Farm. It was a fun time to go to the farm because all the animals have babies right now. I was probably the most excited.

F treasure hunt. family, fridge, food, fire truck, face, fingers, fur. The treat was Swedish fish.

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.

E treasure hunt. egg, elbow, elephant (on a book we have), engine, envelope, exercise video. The treasure was Cadbury mini-eggs (delicious).