I’ve been creating units for kindergarten using picture books to introduce the poetic concepts of rhythm, rhyme, and metaphor. Today I thought I’d write about another picture book that would help in teaching older children about metaphors in poetry: Red Sings from Treetops by Joyce Sidman and illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski.
Strawberry simply loves butterflies right now! As we prepared a report about butterflies for our recent project fair, we took the chance to act out the parts of the butterfly life cycle. This whole body gross motor play is just how she learns! I know she’ll not forget the details we discussed: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly with antennae and proboscis. These are now ingrained in her memory. Plus, it was tons of fun to act out!
Now that Strawberry is becoming more and more aware of words and sounds and even starting to sound out consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words, she was very excited to try a flower-themed word family picture sort.
Strawberry loves flowers. The beautiful springtime is finally showing us tiny green buds and she cannot wait to see the blooms. For this activity, Strawberry said the name of the picture on each flower. Then, she found the matching short vowel pot to put it in. Using mini-flower pots from the gardening center and popsicle sticks and clothes pins made this word family picture sort into a multi-dimensional hands-on activity. Continue reading
My daughter has fallen in love with VeggieTales, which is now on Netflix! She loves that each episode ends with a reminder of God’s love for each of us, and I must admit that I like that too. We also happened to read a number of fun books about vegetables (named below), so this week we have been focusing on some vegetables learning activities!
We are working on multiplication a little bit each week these days. I also discovered this week that my son could not remember the difference between area and perimeter! This week, I decided to give him a design challenge: plan a flower garden. It turned out to be a fun way to review area and perimeter!
This month’s Story Corner Blog Hop is about Spring, and while I have a huge number of favorite spring books I could share about (I may in the coming weeks), the book I kept coming back to is one that my daughter has recently fallen in love with: Lift-the-Flap Colors.
Because spring is simply packed full of new colors, this seemed the perfect book to keep my daughter interested in a Springy activity. We decided to make our own Lift-the-Flap book, but this time with the spring colors we see!
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