Kevin Henkes Author Study

Our first author study of the year is Kevin Henkes.  The kids love his stories, even though a few of his books are a bit long for the beginning of the year when attention spans are at their shortest.  My fellow pre-k teacher and I had a hard time finding activities that were appropriate for four and five year old kids who aren't reading and writing yet, so I created some activities on my own.  

Here are a few of the activities that we did: 

 

 A class book to go with Julius the Baby of the World

 A memory match game to go with the book Birds

 Cutting practice to go with Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse

 

A color by number to go with Lilly's Big Day

The pack I created comes with 15 pages of activities to use with preschool, pre-k, or kindergarten aged children.  It has activities to go with:

-Bailey Goes Camping
-Julius the Baby of the World
-Birds
-Lilly's Big Day
-Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse

It has a range of activities, including:
-Patterning
-Fishing (motor skills)
-Tracing on straight, curved, and diagonal lines
-Cutting on straight, curved, and diagonal lines
-A class book to display for parents
-Memory Game
-Color by Number (up to 5)

Let me know if there's a particular story you would like me to add to the pack or if there's a particular skill you would like me to create an activity for. 

To get the pack go my Teachers Pay Teachers page here.

Enjoy!

Homophones and Homographs

A couple years ago I posted pictures of some homophone and homograph posters on Pinterest and lately they have been getting re-pinned  a lot, so I thought I would post  a link to the clip art that I used to make them. 

Homograph clip art
Homophone clip art

Enjoy!

Name writing activities

It's several weeks into the school year and I haven't posted anything about my new class yet, but it's all good- they're a great bunch!  I have 11 kids and they are loads of fun and full of personality.  I'm so lucky that their transition was easy, I didn't even have any criers on the first day!  We've been hard at work on identifying their names, identifying the letters in their names, and getting the muscles in their hands strong enough to be ready to start writing their names.  Here are some pictures of the name writing activities we've done so far this year. 

We started learning about names by focusing on the first letter.  My students fancied up their first letter with paint and glitter. We made fancy names using some of the materials in the art center. 

On Deanna Jump's blog I found this cute Wheels on the Bus activity.  My kids had a hard time getting through the song without giggling...it was a lot of fun!

If you want the words I used for the poster here they are: Wheels on the bus poster words
And here are the things that the students cut out: Wheels on the Bus student papers

We worked a lot on name identification too.  We used do-a-dot markers to decorate their names.  We also put their handprints on the paper too and laminated it so that they can be placemats for playdough this year.  

 Here are my students fishing for their names.  I printed out clip art fish on cardstock and wrote the names of each of my students on the fish.  Then I attached a paperclip mouth on each fish and gave students a magnet on a piece of yarn to go fishing with.  They loved trying to catch their names!

We worked on fine motor skills and letter recognition by making name mosaics.  They came out really nicely!

 We also did the same thing but with pasta.

We worked on learning the letters in their names, in order, by putting together name puzzles. 

I used a hot glue gun to go over their names so that they could be used to make crayon rubbings. 

We used alphabet stamps and glitter paint to stamp out their names with the letters in the right order.

We did a similar thing using playdough to make the letters in their names.  If you want my favorite play dough recipe go here: Playdough Recipe

This is a sorting activity.  Students were given foam letters and they had to sort them into two columns, letters in my name and letters not in my name. 

Once we finally started writing their names, we used this disappearing names worksheet where they slowly start writing more and more of their name and we went outside in the HOT, HOT sun and used sidewalk chalk to write the bricks surrounding our early childhood playground. 

Here's a poem we used throughout our time working on names.

If you have any great name activities leave a comment!