DIY Analog Angry Birds

Angry Birds is a fun – but the downside is only one person can play at a time and if your mom says no more electronic devices, well then -you can’t play at all!  We have just the solution for these types of situations – it’s Analog Angry Birds – all the fun and no electricity! In fact, we don’t know if the kids had more fun making the game or playing it!

Here’s what you will need:

• several different colors of yarn (the birds are white, blue, black, yellow and red – you can use the same colors or get crazy and use the colors you have!)
• scissors
• paper
• glue
• colored pens
• milk top (to trace circle)
• 5 paper cups
• green tempera paint

1) The first thing you will need to do is to paint your cups green.

2) While the paint is drying, start making your birds.  Wrap the yarn around your four fingers (use your thumb to hold the end of the yarn when you start).  You will need to wrap several times – for the really thin yarn we went anywhere from 75 to 100 times, with the thicker yarn we wrapped about 30 times.  This was a good fine motor skill and a great way to get the kids counting.

• -Not all of the kids can count past 10, so we counted to 10 and then put a tick mark to remember how many times we went around.
• -The more times you go around your hand, the fuller your pompom will be.
• – Be sure not to wrap too tightly or you will hurt your hand and have a hard time sliding the yarn off.

Once you are finished wrapping, cut off the end and slide the yarn off your hand.  Tie another small strand of yarn around the center to hold the pompom together.  Cut each loop and then roll the pompom around in your hand to fluff it up a bit.

3) Use the milk bottle top to trace a circle and then draw your Angry Bird’s face (we know what you are thinking – “hey, this could be a great lesson to do emotions”- good idea! we thought so too! you can make some happy, sad, silly etc).  Glue the face onto your pompom.

4) Once your cup is dry, draw on a pig’s face.

5) Now you are ready to play!

Thanks to make and takes for this funtastic idea!

 

 

Achi Workshop, 9 Marzo

The Jacket I Wear In The Snow

Printable worksheet for the kiddies to color.

Tin Can Telephones

Old school toys are the best!  This is such a simple toy, but has lasted over the years because it is fun as well as fascinating AND it doesn’t take much to make them.

     Supplies:

• 2 empty and cleaned cans
• string
• paper (wrapping paper, old magazines, newspapers etc)
• glue
• paintbrush
• nail/hammer

Turn the can open side down and begin to decoupage by tearing a small piece of paper and glue it onto the can.  Keep on going until you get almost to the bottom.  Flip the can over and finish covering it, be sure to cover the lip of the can and a bit of the inside that that all sharp and dangerous edges are covered over.  (This will probably require adult supervision, especially if the can has many sharp parts that stick out).   Do the same for the other can.

When the cans are dry, take a nail and hammer 1 hole into the bottom of each can.  (This will require adult supervision).  Cut a piece of string into the desired length, thread each end through the hole in the can (from the outside to the inside) and tie a knot at each end. (You can experiment with this to discover what works better or how long of a string you can use and still hear your friend).  Now you are ready to talk!

Make sure the string is a bit taught or the sound vibrations won’t travel along the and you won’t be able to hear the other person. We told the kids that the phones only worked if they spoke in English – you can trick the younger kids by having them speak in their mother tongue while the line is slack and then speak in English when the line is taut :o)

 

 

Masketeers

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:

• cardboard
• tempera paint
• glue
• scissors
• wooden skewers

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.

Carnival Workshop 9 Febbraio

Tin Can Phone Workshop, Sabato 2 Febbraio

Short Vowel Sounds

It’s a challenge to teach phonetics here (well I am sure everywhere, but I only have experience here), because the kids don’t usually have a large enough vocabulary  before they start reading and writing in English. Kids usually learn to spell by memorization.  I really wanted to create a game where kids could start listening/pronouncing to see if they could distinguish short letter sounds-so they could start to learn to spell phonetically, just as they learn to spell in Italian.  There are a few words that the kids would know (at least according to Italian curriculum) and a few new ones.  This way they wouldn’t have to learn a whole new vocabulary, but couldn’t depend on the fact that they knew how to spell some of the words already.  We’ve used the cards to play a few different games, so far it’s been a good challenge.   For all the games you will need to print off 1 copy each of card, laminate and cut out.  I’m including what each card is, because although I thought it was clear, the kids  pointed out certain cards could have more than one name. (The little stinkers don’t let me get away with anything :o)

cat, bag, sad, jam map, lamp, crab, flag, clam, black

ten, bed, net, red, egg, tent, desk, sled, bell, seven

pig, pin, sit, six, big, king, fish, milk, ship, stick

pot, top, dog, mop, box, rock, frog, stop, lock, clock

bug, bus, sun, gum, sub, plum, duck, jump, drum, truck

Here are the games we played:

What’s Missing

Single Sound Slam – This is a good game if you are just working on 1 sound, for example short a.  You will need a ball or a bell.  Place the bell in the center of the table. Take 1 short  a card out of the deck and place it face up.  The teacher flips one card over, if the sound matches the face up card (in this case short a), the first kid to grab the bell wins a point.  If the bell is grabbed and the sounds don’t match, the student gets a point taken away.

Sound Slam – Pull out 1 card from each sound and place them face up on the table.  All the kids sit facing the teacher.  The teacher flips 1 card and the first kid to slam her hand onto the cards with matching sound wins a point.  If the wrong card is slammed, a point is lost.

Memory, with a Twist –  when I told the kids we were going to play Memory, they all said, ‘But, the cards don’t match!’  And they were right! The game is played just like regular memory, but instead of finding matching pictures, the kids find matching short vowel (or middle) sounds.

Written Memory:  If the kids already know how to write, take out all the cards of one sound.  Give the kids a few minutes to memorize all the cards.  Take the all the cards away and then have the kids write down as many cards as they remember.   I never tell the kids that the cards are spelled with the same vowel, it’s amazing that they figure it out and make fewer spelling mistakes.  It seems too easy, but I think it’s okay because the challenge is to remember the cards, not struggle with how to spell.  Plus, spelling in English is so difficult for kids, sometimes it’s good to play an easy spelling game, where they can feel proud and not easily discouraged.  The game can also be played by mixing up the cards, but it’s much more of a challenge because the kids usually remember fewer cards and struggle with the spelling a bit more.

Complicated to explain, but not so complicated to play:

Flip Flop – this is a good small group game. Prep: you will need the cards, plus a bell or a horn or a small ball to put in the center of the table. Each player is dealt a card, until all the cards are dealt out, each player should have the same number of cards. (There are 50 cards, so this only works properly if you can divide the number of players into 50.  If you have 3, 4, 6 or 8 players, you will have to take out 2 cards (of the same sound)- that way there will be 48 cards.  If you have 7 players, you will either have to take out 8 cards, so that there will be 42 cards in the deck or take out 1 and there will be 1 card that won’t have a match.  That said – here is how to play: each player places their stack of cards in front of themselves face down.  One at a time players flip a card face up, (making sure to flip the card towards the group and not towards himself, so that everyone can see).  When there are 2 cards of the same sound face up, the first player to grab the bell in the center of the table says the matching cards/sounds and wins those 2 cards.  Attention, if that reveals 2 more cards with the same sound, the bell can be grabbed again.  Once everyone has flipped over 1 card, the round begins again with each player flipping another card face up and stacking it on top of his previous face up card.  (Each player should have two stacks of cards, one face down and one face up).  When all the cards are exhausted, each player gathers his stack of face up cards and play begins again.

For all the games: make sure you and the kids stretch out the vowel sounds so the kids can hear them better.

If you have any other ideas of how to use these cards write us about it, we’d love to hear what you have to say.  Here is a special challenge:  you may have noticed that each set of cards has 5 three letter words, 3 four letter words and 2 five letter words- there is some sort of Scrabble game just waiting to be invented!).

Dancing Penguin Workshop

Emotional Pumpkins

Since we teach English Through Art, it’s not always easy to create a good balance between teaching English, allowing enough room for the kids to be creative and experiencing different artistic techniques.  This project was a good one clear idea: creating pumpkins that showed various emotions-not too complicated on the English, the kids could get creative by drawing the emotions they chose and the shape of a pumpkin is pretty generic so they could experience watercolors without struggling too much with how to draw.

To learn the emotions we did several games before actually rolling up our sleeves and getting to work each session. We used the cards below we played memory, charades and pictionary.  Click on the link for our pumpkin emotions crossword puzzle.

We also had contests trying to create different emotions using our pumpkin game, the first few times we asked them to do which emotions to do and after a while they had fun experimenting and have each other guess what they were doing.  Before beginning to paint, the kids used the game to create emotions and then sketch them – taking careful notice at how the eyes, mouth and eyebrows had to be placed in order to convey the emotion they wanted to do.

When we finally dove in, we first divided a large paper into 4 sections and the kids used a black crayon to draw their Emotional Pumpkins.  They were instructed to draw 1 pumpkin and 1 emotion per section and to do the pumpkin as large as they could, but they had to stay inside the confines of the space and they had to try and use their sketches.  Using water colors the kids had to shade from dark to light inside each segment of each pumpkin to give the pumpkins more dimension.  This was a real challenge – trying to control a very spontaneous medium.  There was one more challenge to this project – the kids were only given primary colors to paint with, so all of the other colors had to be mixed.  (This was not the first project mixing water colors, otherwise I think I would cut this step out so as not to get too overwhelming).   They did great and had a lot of fun.

The final step was to have the kids talk about how their pumpkins were feeling. We were really proud of them, I think they were surprised at how much they learned.