Thinky Linky Thursday

The most clicked on link from last week was:

Yay! I finally got all my buttons (with HTML) put up on the right sidebar, so if you were featured, you can grab it from there. Thanks for linking up!

Painting Sticks

We also painting sticks last week. Why, you ask? Because we can! Painting on paper gets kinda boring after a while, so we decided to gather up some sticks outside in the dump truck:

Then we used all these different colors to paint. We talked about the colors as we painted.

 He used fine motor and hand eye coordination to paint the sticks.

It was kinda hard to get the stick to hold still while he was trying to paint it, so he decided to pick it up and dip it in the paint.

The brush we used was a little too long for him to handle. (I have since bought more kid-friendly brushes)

Eventually he gave up the brush altogether and the sticks and went to painting himself.

See, look what I did!

Here are our finished sticks before they dried. I helped him finish up painting them.

 Here is the finished product after they dried. If you have any ideas on what we can do with them now, please comment!

Tutorial Tuesday: Tissue Paper Containers

I have a bunch of these little baby food jars covered in tissue paper around the house that the big kids have made over the years at school. They usually come home with a little tea light candle in them and they usually get made around Christmas time and Mother's Day.

I thought Sammie would enjoy making some of these type of jars, but I don't have any baby food jars here anymore. I'm not sure why I didn't save them from when Austin ate baby food. So we went through our recycling bin and box of recycling items that I have saved to look for suitable containers. We found an empty mayo container and an  icing container and decided to use those We got out the tissue paper squares that we have left over from our tissue paper and glue pictures and our stained glass Canadian flags. Maddie put some white glue in a couple of little dishes and watered it down with a little water. The glue was just watered down enough that it could be painted with.  And since the weather was so beautiful, we took our supplies and did our craft outside :)

I showed Sammie how to paint some glue onto her container and then stick the tissue paper squares to the glue.

She covered her container with the tissue paper and then painted another layer of glue over top of the tissue paper to make sure the tissue paper was completely wet with glue.

Once they were all covered, we set them upside down to dry.

While their first containers were drying, they decided to do a couple more containers. This time they choose some of craft supply containers to decorate. Maddie even covered the lid of her container, making an almost sun shaped design.

All four of their containers. :) The big ones will be used as they originally were, to hold craft supplies, and the little ones will probably be used for pencil holders or maybe flower vases. :)

The girls had fun decorating their containers, although Sammie was getting a little frustrated that she kept getting glue on her fingers. I think I will have to see if I can find either some baby food jars or some other glass jars to make the candle holders like they do at school. They look so prety with the candle lighting them up from the inside :)

Ocean Sensory Bin

This week, we finally made the ocean sensory bin with jello that I have been planning forever! There were a few fails on my part though that made it not turn out as planned, but we still had fun anyway and that's all that counts.

First of all, I had to use 8 boxes of jello and it still only turned out to be this much. I waited too long to add the sea animals and therefore it messed up the smoothness of the top (to give it the appearance of water).

Here is one of our sharks. Also, I tried putting these flat plastic glow-in-the-dark fish in, but not realizing that it would be very difficult to get enough light to them to make them glow once the jello set. But it's ok because we decided to take this messy project outside anyway.

He was a little tentative to put his hands in at first.

Then I showed him that he could eat it.

That really got him going and that's pretty much all he wanted to do after that.

We had a fun, messy time.

I finally got him to dig out some of the fish and he started making a pile of them on the bench, so I got him a bowl to collect them in.

Here's little man all jello-ed up!

Here is the aftermath!

Afterwards, we used the jello boxes to build with!

Enjoy and happy jello-ing :)

Thinky Linky Thursday

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Last week's most clicked links were:

Mighty Math Powers with Flowers

from Teaching Munchkins

The Grouchy Ladybug

from Teaching My Blessings

Thanks for linking up and here is a button for those who were featured:

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Tutorial Tuesday: Teaching Letter Sounds

Hi! My name is Tammy from 123 Teach With Me. 

I'm so glad Lori invited me to be here!! I'm a teacher of 10 years and love sharing and inspiring other teachers. I think it's so important to build a strong connection between school and home. That's the main reason why I started my blog....to share my ideas with teachers AND parents. A child's success is not possible with only the teacher or only the parent. It's takes both to build a successful student.

Today I'm going to share with you a fun way I teach my own kids beginning letter sounds and practice with finding sounds in words. 

I came up with this when my son started to learn his letter sounds and he loved it!! We played this in the car, outside, and while we were shopping in stores. When I knew we were going play the game, I would give my son a magnifying glass and tell him we were going on a "hunt". It might be a good idea to keep a hand lens in your purse or bag so if they ask to go "hunting" you will be ready. He always loved to have his own lens to carry along while he was "hunting" because he thought it was funny the way things looked.

The song with this game goes to the tune of "A Hunting We Will Go" Here it is....

A hunting we will go

A hunting we will go

"B" is the sound we're listening for

A hunting we will go

**When they find something that begins with that sound sing...

Bat begins with "B" (make the sound)

Bat begins with "B"

Bat begins with "B B" (make the sound twice)

A hunting we will go.

When we returned home or finished the game, I would get this sheet out (pic below) where we would talk about what we saw that day and I would write down the words. Again, a sheet protector is great so you can easily erase the letter with a tissue and start with a new letter the next day.

This is a quick activity that your children or students will love!! You can also alter this for whatever sounds you are finding in words; ending sounds, blends, digraphs, long vowels, short vowels or just simply finding the actual letter....any specific phonetic skill will work! All children love a little song and I know they will really enjoy this!

Thanks for reading! 

 

New Pinterest Boards!

I decided to go through all of my "Teach Central" pins on Pinterest and sort them by categories. You can click any of the links below to check out that category.

Also, check out my Pinterest page to see some other boards that might be of interest to teachers including many holiday boards, cool sites for kids, parents and educators, things to create, for moms, and yummies for kids.

Happy pinning!