My New Favorite Book!

This past week we learned about weather. While searching for activities and books that would be great to incorporate into the topic, I came across this gem. The book is titled, Windblown by Edouard Manceau. It is relatively new and just came out in April of 2013.

This book is easy to follow, simple enough that a young child can understand it but also can be complex enough that an older child would still like it. The activity that goes with the book is also very versatile for different ages.

First you cut out the shapes that are found in the book. So in the end the child should have 1 large blue shape, 1 red shape, 1 orange shape, 2 small black dots, and 2 dark gray circles.

After the child gets the shapes, the should also be given a glue stick, a black marker, and a white piece of paper. Now, ask them to make a picture with it.

The point of the activity is that they make a picture depicting what they see with the shapes. In the book, the shapes come together to make different animals. Some of the kids wanted to remake the ones in the book but we tried to guide them into making their own animal. We got some great pictures in the end! We had so many, I ended up making a bulletin board out of it. 

Valentine Graphing

For Valentine's Day we graphed candy hearts. The kids really seemed to enjoy this activity. I gave each child a box of hearts. These are completely random so no one had the same results on their graphs!

The first step was to dump the hearts out and organize them by colors.

After sorting, they counted each color and colored in the blocks above the colored heart. For ease of knowing which blocks to color, I taught them how to count the blocks by putting a dot in each one of the color they are to color it in with. 

This worked great and helped them see how far up they needed to color.

The kids did a great job! Even the ones who have a hard time with math skills found this activity to be fun and easy to understand. And in the end they got to take the box of hearts home to eat. So it ends with an even better reward!