L is for Lion, hear me roar!

As some of you may know my youngest son's name is very unique and very based upon a lion, so L happened to be one of my favorite Letters!  It also happens to be the only letter my 3 year old still has a hard time saying, so we love to practice it.  And we also have another girl blessed with an L name also, so she loved it. 

When I think of L I think of laughing and that is what I tried to keep my kiddos doing.  It was easy for the kids to get used to writing the Letter L and coming up with L words so we had fun.  We also made sure and worked on walking in a Line, trying to color inside the Lines, the difference between Large and Little and also how something can be Long.  Along with all that we managed to take our time learning the letter L and doing many fun activities including:

*We made Lion masks.  To achieve this you cut out the hole in the center of a paper plate, have strips of construction paper cute out in brown, yellow and orange, let the kiddos curl the paper using a pencil then glue the strips on.  You can also take this as a teaching moment with patterns and have them stick to a particular color pattern. As we worked on our Lion masks I told them some fun facts of Lions and how they are the King of the jungle.  As an added bonus since they had been so good I allowed them to watch LION KING!  Talk about a roaring good time :)

* We made hand print Lillies.  I took this from a pattern in a parents magazine, it was complicated but fun and the kids enjoyed seeing their hand print used to make something.  You cut out leaves from card stock that you will hole punch in the middle.  Then trace the kids right hand and cut it out.  Now curl them all with a pencil and attach to a green straw with tape.  And to top it all off you can cut a yellow pipe cleaner in half and stick it through the straw to stick up like the pollen.  These were pretty Lillies that they all took home to Mommy :)

* We made Love Ladybugs.  This was another fun template I borrowed from the web.  You cut out all the pieces for the kids before hand and let them count and glue them all together.  You need to cut out a Big Heart, a small heart ( in red), 2 small black hearts, 6 big legs that are L's, 2 small L legs and 2 antenna that are in the shapes of 6's.  This shows there are 6 legs to a ladybug.  I then drew on eyes and along the way we talked about how a lady bug grows and other interesting facts.  Like did you know that when they flap their wings they go at 84 times a second?!  And of course the hearts represent LOVE.  So there you have it, our Love Ladybug!

K is for Kid!

When you get right down to it there are not that many words that really come to mind that start with K that are in our day to day vocabularies.  So I decided to keep it simple and stick to the things that Kids love most, animals!
I learned from the kids that K is a letter that can be a bit tricky to write, but with enough practice they started to get the hang of it.  And don't even get me started on the fact that some K words sound like they could start with the letter C.  In my mind they are still 3 and just getting them to learn the sound that it makes and how to write it is plenty for now.  So when we were working on those basics we:

* Made a Kangaroo puppet.  I used a template from a website and cut out arms, ears, a nose, eyes, a tongue, a pouch and a baby kangaroo to go in the pouch.  The kids then glued on all of the body parts on to a paper bag and had a blast making their Kangaroos hop with their hands.

* We colored a Koala and talked all about them.


* We made Kites on a page and colored a picture where the Kite was flying.  You will notice I cut out a colored kite from construction paper and glued it on the page along with a piece of yearn to show it was flying in the sky.  The Kids loved using their imaginations to show where the Kite was flying.  I wanted to show them an actual Kite in the sky but we just didn't have the wind for it.

Crafty mama moments

Lately my husband and I have been having the argument of whether or not I am spoiling my children or just being creative and fun. Well OBVIOUSLY I am just being creative and fun, duh! ;-) Well in their lunches lately I have found it to be so fun to make their sandwiches into fun shapes....

Who doesn't love a little bit of LOVE with their lunch?

And you know those lunch ables that kids love but you hate to buy because one they are packed full of sodium and two they are super expensive? Well here's my solution to that:

Healthy nitrate free turkey, mozzarella cheese and organic crackers :)

So what's your vote? Spoiled or crafty and fun?

The best part of it is that you can make them according to whatever your kid happens to be into that day because we all know they change their minds so fastly! And if you are focusing on a particular letter or theme for a day you can pick a cookie cutter that coordinates with that. I stick with it's just fun for the kids and fun for me...so FUN all around.

I and J!

Well I bet you thought I wasn't coming back?! Nah, just have had a lot of stuff going on in life right now that has taken my focus away from the blog. I did still manage to do a couple of letters with some fun activities. If you didn't know my youngest son had to be seen by a GI last week and he went through some tests and a scan so we can figure out what is going on. A week later and we still don't have many answers, but it doesn't look like he will need surgery anytime soon, which is a blessing for sure! Then this week he caught a nasty virus and well I know he will bounce back soon! And not to mention this WONDERFUL weather! Who wants to stay inside when we have weather that allows us to open all the windows and just play outside ALL day?! Anyway onto the preschool where the learning still must go on :)

I have to admit, I didn't have much for I so we worked on it for 1 day. In that one day we did practice writing the letter and came up with words that start with I. As far as activities go:

*We colored an Elmo coloring sheet with the letter I for Igloo on it.

* We made an Ice cream cone and worked on shapes at the same time. I cut out triangles for the cone and circles for the ice cream and had them identify which shape was which and then they glued it onto a Popsicle stick. They had a blast pretending to eat it.

* Oh and we can't forget we colored Iron man pages ( my son's favorite)

As for J:

* one of my kid's names' starts with J and this happened to be on the first day of awesome weather and GI appointment so we decided to work on his name and we ended up making name plates the kids rooms. I wrote their names in block letters and let them color them however they wanted to and then I drew their favorite character on them. I can't post the pics because I can't tell their names but trust me they were super cute! And boy art sure is stress relieving for me :) We also took a moment to talk about Jesus and who He is and that He loves us!

* The next day we made Jack-O-Lantern masks. I drew orange lines down white paper plates, then let the kids color them orange and pick the shapes they wanted the eyes and mouth to be and then I cut them out. Lastly I punched holes on each side, attached some yarn and we had masks!

* I made Jello! Who doesn't love Jello? I tried to make them into little J's with my cookie cutter but it didn't work out so much so we just settled for eating it and saying Jello over and over.

* Our last activity was my favorite just because it came out so cool! We made jellyfish! I gave the kids all a piece of plastic wrap and instructed them to scrunch it up a bit and we glued it down to the paper. Then we glued on pieces of tissue paper strings that were blue as the tentacles. The kids enjoyed talking about jellyfish which was fun as well.