It’s Carnival Time! Instead of making a whole mask, the kids gigantic face parts – and it really brought out the silly in them.
You don’t need too many supplies:
To make the masks just draw out a body part, cut and paint. When the paint is dry, glue the skewer onto the back and…wahlah you are done.
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This week’s workshop was Circus Fun – so we made a Jumping Clown (also called a Jumping Jack). The vocabulary for this project was body parts and to jump, so we sang the Hokey Pokey before getting started. Here’s a cute and funny version of the song:
To make the clown here is what you will need:
Step 6: Glue the hat to the clown’s head. Glue the head to the clown’s body.
Step 7: Punch 2 holes into the arms and legs as indicated on the template. Punch holes on the clown’s body at shoulder and hip level.
Step 8: Line the bottom hole an arm or leg with the corresponding hole in the body, insert a brad and open. Do the same for all appendages.
Step 9: Thread a long piece of yarn through the top hole of each appendage and tie a knot at the bottom.
Step 10: Your clown is ready. Pull on the string and watch him (or her) jump!
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I looked out the window and what did I see? Popcorn popping on an apricot tree. It’s springtime! Just the right time to make a spring blossom picture! Here’s what you will need:
Use the white pencil to draw some branches of a tree. Paint your branches with glue (do a nice thick layer).
Sprinkle lots and lots of salt over the glue. Let the glue dry and then shake the salt off. (We didn’t have time to let the glue dry, so we had to be extra delicate doing the next step).
Paint the salt brown. Let dry.
Lay a square of tissue paper onto the top of a pencil (the side without the point) and fold downward, forming a flower blossom. Dip the flat part into glue and stick onto a tree branch. Keep doing that until your tree is covered with flowers. We glued little crushed up balls of tissue paper to the center of the flowers just to make them a little more colorful.
And there you have it, a beautiful tree with lots of spring blossoms! Achooo! Just kidding these trees are hypoallergenic!
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Self portraits are a great exercise in observation. The objective of this project was not not only to learn the names of body parts, but also for each kid to be aware in detail of what they looked like. Did they have a big mouth or a small mouth? Long hair or short hair? What color? We also asked that the kids put something in the background was a reflection of themselves (a sort of inner self portrait). And on top of all that, the kids got to experiment with chalk pastels. Everyone had used chalk before (on chalk boards, on side walks), but it was the first time that they got to use it as an artistic medium-mixing and blending the colors together. We think they did a pretty great job all linguistically, artistically and fun-tistically! (Yes, we made that last word up, but they did have fun!)
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Although the clothes in the video above may have gone out of style (oh the memories those outfits bring back!), Do the Bunny Hop is a classic that is here to stay! The lyrics and the moves are pretty simple so get ready to sing and dance and hop right in to Easter!
Put your right foot forward
Put your left foot out
Do the Bunny Hop
Hop, Hop, Hop!
Dance this new creation
It’s the new sensation
Do the Bunny Hop
Hop, Hop, Hop!
Let’s all join in the fun
Father, Mother, Son
Do the Bunny Hop
Hop, Hop, Hop!
And if you don’t have a chance to make your own Bunny Lumps Guess Who? game, you can print out these little guys and play. You’ll have to check out the Bunny Lumps link above to see how to play the card version of Guess Who? You know, we are always looking (or trying to invent) new games to play with the same cards, so here is another one to try on for size:
Three Of A Kind
Preparation: Print one copy each of the two bunny cards.
Object of the game: Find three of a kind
1-? players
Shuffle the cards. Lay down 9 cards face up. When a player sees 3 cards that share 3 similarities (3 ears of the same color, 3 noses of the same color, 3 bodies of the same color or 3 tails of the same color), she raises her hand and says ‘Three of a kind.’ The the player must say the names of the rabbits and what their similarities are. That player gets the 3 cards and 3 new ones are dealt in their place. If no one can find three similarities and it is agreed upon by all, the cards can be shuffled back into the deck and 9 new ones dealt (or you can take the three top cards off and 3 news can be dealt). The winner is the person holding the most cards at the end of the game.
We just made up this game, so we’re not really sure how it will work out. If you play it let us know, if we play it first, we’ll let you know!
Happy Easter!
A while back, we saw adorable little bunny lumps on House Wren Studios. They are simple enough for the kids to make, but just making one was not enough. Then we had the brilliant idea (yes, we are patting ourselves on the back for this one :o) use the idea for an Easter Guess Who? game.
Supplies:
It’s actually quite simple how to make the ‘lumps’ all you need to do is squish a small ball of dough into a small lump. Roll tiny pieces of dough for the nose and the tail, Cut out ears from the craft foam and poke them in. Use the skewer to poke 2 eyes on the bunny – tadah you are finished. The really fun part is – when the bunnies dry, write names on little slips of paper and glue them to the bottom of the bunnies.
To make sure that the kids didn’t repeat combinations of ears, eyes, noses and tails we made a little chart and cut it up into squares. The kids chose the bunny they wanted to make and then wrote the number down, followed the ‘bunny lump recipe’ and then put the card back, fished out another and began again. Since the process was pretty simple, this let the kids be pretty independent and go at their own pace.
To play Guess Who? You will need 2 or more players. Set the bunnies on the table in a random order. Decide who will go first (this will be Player A). Player A chooses a bunny (but doesn’t say who it is), the rest of the players ask yes or no questions to guess which bunny it is by process of elimination, ie: first guesser (Player B) says – does the bunny have blue ears. If Player A says YES, all bunnies WITH blue ears are taken off the table. If Player A says NO, all the bunnies WITHOUT blue ears are take off the table. And so on and so forth for the rest of the players. After player asks his yes or no question, they should be asked ‘Would you like to guess which bunny it is?’ – if Player B (or C or D) says yes and guesses correctly, she wins. If she guesses incorrectly, she skips her next turn.
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We read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom to get the kids familiar with letters in English. (Instead you get Miss Tracy from Little Story Bug :o) It’s a fun a rhythmic story all about letters! And then the kids go to decorate the letters of their name.
Here’s what you will need: pipe cleaners, yarn scraps
1. Use the pipe cleaners to shape the letters of your name. (If you run out of pipe cleaners just take another one and twist the ends together and keep going). This was actually quite a challenge trying to figure out how to keep all the letters joined together, even if the kids wrote their name in cursive.
2. Then take a bit of yarn (we used anywhere from a foot to 2 feet) and start wrapping. Try and wrap in a way that the end of the piece of yarn you are using and the end of the old piece of yarn get tucked underneath. If you can’t just make sure you tuck the ends under one strand as you finish, so your letter won’t unravel later on.
3. Don’t get bent out of shape if your letters got bent out of shape, just reshape it back into the correct position. The yarn will help the letters be stiffer and hold their form better. Now you have your name written in really cool fancy letters!
There weren’t too many steps to make this project, so it sounds like it’s pretty easy, but it’s actually pretty challenging. It’s not easy to make all the letters of your name join up and then it takes a lot of hand eye coordination and fine motor skills to finish the project. So good luck and have fun!
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom is also a song:
Just for fun, here is the hip hop version:
Thanks to Bloesm Kids for the artistic inspriation!
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Mr Clicketty Cane is such a silly song to learn daily activities. Kids think it is so funny and crack up every time they sing it. It’s a great song because there is a lot of movement and acting out you can do while singing. Here are some cards to teach the silly vocabulary from the song and the vocabulary with the ‘normal’ words. As usual, you can learn the vocabulary by playing Memory, Go Fish, Pictionary and this is a fun game to play Charades with since you can also mime out the words!
An alternative to the traditional way to play Memory: instead of finding pairs of the same cards, try play Association Memory. Play with just one copy of each card.
ps In case you are wondering….The song is from an Australian man named Peter Combes. In some regions of Australia, they call a slide a slippery dip.
To read this in Italian, click here.
Ingredients:
1 pkg dry yeast
1 tsp sugar
1 1/4 c warm water
3 c all purpose flour (or you can use 2 c all purpose and 1 c semolina flour)
1 tsp salt
1 tbls olive oil
Put yeast, sugar and water into a large bowl. Stir and let stand for about 5 minutes. If it bubbles up, that’s a good sign. That means the yeast are eating the sugar and burping up air bubbles that will make your dough nice and fluffy!
Add the flour, salt and olive oil and then use your hands to start mixing. Don’t worry about mixing everything perfectly. Put the dough onto a floured surface (like a table or a counter) and knead it for about 10 minutes. Next, shape the dough into a ball and put into a clean, lightly greased (covered with a little bit of olive oil) bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and let sit in a warm, draft free (no wind or breezes) place for at least an hour.
Now you can use your dough to make pizza! In Italy a pizza with just tomato and sauce is called Pizza Margherita, in honor of the first pizza served to Queen Margherita. The pizza was made with colors of the Italian flag red (tomato), white (cheese) and green (basil).
Buon apetito! (good appetite)
Click here for a printable version of the Pizza Dough recipe.
To read this in Italian, click here.
Who doesn’t love pizza? Certainly not us! Pete’s a Pizza is a fun book about a boy in a bad mood and what his parents do to change it.
ARTiculation360 