Letter of the week – Cc is for Caterpillar – Days of the Week Activity

We continued having lots of fun with our Cc is for Caterpillar series, it has so much to teach, that you can go a whole week with it.

For today’s activity I will be focusing and introducing the days of the week. Fortunately,the book of Eric Carle “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” is a great tool to teach kids the days of the week. 

For those who haven’t read it, the book is about a caterpillar who hatches from an egg on a leaf and is looking for food. The book uses the days of the week consecutively beginning on Sunday and ending a week later, on Sunday. It provides kids with a great visual in order to help them remember the days of the week.     

First, I discussed with Inigo that there are 7 days in a week. Then, we started sequencing the story by reciting the days of the week and the story while sticking the pictures to the correct day.

Simple yet full of learnings!

 

Letter of the week – Cc is for Caterpillar Balloon Painting

Inigo loves painting and playing balloons. I thought the balloon caterpillar painting would be a great idea to do for our letter of the week series. 

We’ve done a lot of activities for our Cc is for caterpillar so I guess injecting some messy free art activity would be our best bet! For our Cc for Caterpillar Art Session involves two things Inigo love- painting with balloons and The Very Hungry Caterpillar!

Materials:

• Balloons
• Markers
• Googly eyes
• Popsicle sticks 
• Glue
• Green, Blue and Red Tempera Paint

  
How to Make the Balloon Painted Caterpillar Craft

• Squeeze tempera paints onto a paper plate or other surface that’s easily accessible to little hands. We used red, green, and a dab of blue.
• Dip the balloon into the paint and stamp them onto your paper to create a caterpillar.
• Use a black marker or crayon to draw legs.
• Cut off small pieces of purple craft stick and glue onto your caterpillar for antennae.
• Add some googly eyes to your caterpillar. 

So naturally we spent an entire day discussing not only the book but caterpillars too! 

Letter of the week – Cc is for Caterpillar Necklace Threading Fine Motor Activity

 
I have always loved doing threading activity with my kids. It is brilliant for developing fine motor skills and hand eye coordination.

The only problem is that for little fingers holding a shoelace can be really tricky. It’s just to bendy to put it through a tiny hole. There are instances that  Inigo get so frustrated and don’t want to continue.

So when I am preparing for this craft I made sure that he’ll enjoy this activity. We are still in our letter Cc series so it seemed natural to make a caterpillar necklace. 

Making a caterpillar necklace is a fun follow-up to reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar!

With the the ziploc bag, I dyed the pasta using alcohol and few drops of green food coloring. Then,sun dry for 5 minutes. While waiting for the pasta, I pre-cut the laminated pictures and hole punch for easy threading. When the invitation is all set. Inigo is thrilled to start.

This crafts is perfect for literature and math component.He will have the opportunity to practice patterns and counting in response to a very popular children’s story. 

While doing the craft we retell the story.So he first thread the tiny and a very hungry caterpillar.Next, he added green pasta onto the thread. Then,he continued to add the pictures and green pasta forming a pattern.

The best part of this activity is it allows Inigo to be creative while also working on patterning and fine motor skills.  

Letter of the week – Cc is for Caterpillar Activities

I was excited to pull together a fun follow up activities for our Cc is for Caterpillar series.

These simple, colorful activities are a motivating way to practice language arts,fine motor, pre-writing, and even cutting skills of Inigo.

The Activities: 

1. Language Arts – Letter Cc dot-to-dot activity

We used various colors of stickers to form the letter Cc. Then, we traced the letter using his index finger for tactile sensory. 

2. Pre-writing skills

As usual we always include pre-writing in our activities, to train him holding the pencil properly. We are still on working progress but I can see a great potential that in no time he can hold it correctly.

 
3.  Cutting skills

Cutting is one of his favorite activity. This cutting practice allows him to cut straight lines.

4. Fine Motor Skills- Hole Punch Activity

Inspired by the book this Hole Punch Fine Motor Activity was a great addition to our lesson. 

On a recent trip to the office supplies store, I spotted hole punches and I grabbed one for the kids. 

Fine motor activities like this help young kids develop the strength needed in their hands and fingers to hold a pencil and write. They work the muscles in the fingers and hands and develop wrist movement, leading to holding a pencil for long periods of time and writing with strong and controlled muscles.

 

We did this Cc is for Caterpillar activities specifically to bring a little caterpillar learning fun into our home.

I hope you are also having fun homeschooling your kiddos. Till our next post! Enjoy learning😊

Letter of the week – Cc is for Caterpillar

This letter of the week series turned out to be much more fun that I had originally planned!

Lucky me! One of our all time MOST favorite book starts with letter Cc.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar has always been a favorite book to read to my kids at home, so when I came up with our letter of the week lesson, I just had to include Caterpillar in our series. Of course, our Cc is for Caterpillar resemble the caterpillar from the book!  

This week I’m bringing yet another fun & kid friendly, simple craft to the table!

Lately Inigo and Isabelle has really fallen in love with the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We are also watching the animation story in You Tube. With their passion to follow the caterpillar throughout the book.I threw in some educational spins.
So without further ado – today I present to you our super easy and inexpensive  “Caterpillar Kid Craft”that goes along PERFECTLY with our beloved Eric Carle book. 

 
So let’s grab those craft supplies and get to work on this simple kid craft. We used different color of construction paper. I pre-cut the circles and added tape in each circles. Again, we used our tree to make it more realistic. Then, I printed letter Cc template and sticked it in our door to set the invitation.

While doing the activity not only we are discussing the colors, counting the circles but also solving the caterpillar puzzle.

 He’s all about challenges these days so he confidently grabbed the circles.Bit by bit, he started to placed the pieces together in their just right spot. When he’s done he went to the bookshelf and get the The Very Hungry Caterpillar book.

We read it together and as usual we did enjoy! 

I love the Very Hungry Caterpillar! There are so many fun things to do with this theme. Stay tune for  more fun activities I’ll share!

 

Letter of the week – Bb is for Bb Hat and Sounds

This FREE Letter of the Week Bb Hat is a fun hands on way for a child to learn their letters.

The hat is designed to reinforce and teach each letter and their sound. Each hat has a letter with a picture and corresponding smaller pictures to help teach/reinforce the phonics sound made by the letter. It is a super FUN and effective way to teach letter Bb to Inigo.  I precut the letter Bb hat, he did color and we talked the pictures and the sounds.

And since Inigo is becoming much more aware of letter Bb. I asked him to point to the word that begins with letter Bb on the page. I am simply introducing the begining sounds to him, and he found it right away. Woohoo! He’s figuring out the language of reading!

Such a FUN way to learn and reinforce letter sounds:)

 

Letter of the week – Bb is for Busybee Counting Activity

We learned all about Bb is for BEE this week.For our Math Skills, I came up with this bee and beehive counting activity 

 
Bees are attacking our house for a week now! And the only way to save us from bee sting is to get them back to their beehive.But how? They are everywhere! 

Hmmm..wait a minute! I know…there is only one who can save the day!

My brave little boy is ready to face the challenge! Go Busybee Inigo!! 

My DIY tree was used again when we played this counting skills game.This time, I spread the beehives in our living room floor.

So here’s the task:

• He need to place the numbers in sequence.
• Once he’s done with arranging the number in order, he had to count out the number of bees to match the number on their corresponding beehive. 

 
As a bonus, for doing a great job, mommy baked Brownies to nibble while we’re  watching “Bee Movie”! I didn’t know that our Bumblebee series can be this fun! 

Stay tuned next week for more letters to learn! Have a fab weekend👍

Letter of the week – Pollen Transfer Fine Motor Activity

Since we’ve been talking about bumblebees in our home for our letter Bb series, it seemed only natural that we include a little something about pollination.

I know,Inigo, may seem too young to grasp the idea of bees and how pollination helps plants grow, so before we try this activity,we watched the pollination lesson in You Tube.

 After watching, for a little extra practice of his fine motor skills, we created two flowers out of construction paper so that our “bee” will have a place to gather their pollen.   Then, we used our cute “bee clothespin”and some yellow pom poms to act as our pollen and my little “bee” started the pollination activity. We had so much fun so we opted to used also our tong wrapped in yellow pipe cleaner.  This is such a simple activity that can be done any time and takes only a few minutes to set up but provides so many fun learning opportunities!   

Letter of the week – Bb is for Buzzing Math Activity

Our fun bees math activities are just perfect for our bumblebee theme. Since we have to master counting to 10,these adorable bumblebee count and clip cards, allows him to practice multiple skills at once. Number recognition, counting, one to one correspondence, and fine motor skills all in one! 

To make the cards, I printed and laminated them for durability and extra hardy. Then,I made a cute bee clothespins to go along with this clip cards. And I find it awesome!! Wala lang “cute na cute lang ako”😝 Counting Clip Cards:

Inigo happily grabbed a card and started counting and clipped the number that matched.He continue doing it until he was done with all the cards.  

Letter of the week – Bb is for Bubble Wrap Beehive and Fingerprint Bee Craft

Today, Inigo was a buzzy bee. Bb is for bumblebee is in full swing and we’re already having so much fun!

When we started our bumblebee series, we discussed that bees live in hives. I showed him the picture of the hives. Then I realized creating a hive of our own would be a great arts and craft for our series. 

I’m always keeping bubble wrap in our house, aside from they are Isabelle’s favorite activity. I knew that there are lot of possibilities to use this plastic in our activities.  

Using a rolling pin from his playdough set, we wrapped the bubble wrap around it and taped it down in a couple of places so that it would not fall off, dab some paint in paper plate and then rolled it on our paper. 

At first, I thought, this will be an epic fail because the bubble wrap we used did not actually make a pretty cool honeycomb on our paper, so I asked Inigo to smudge more bubble wrap to create a pattern. 

To finish our beehive, we used brown marker and draw the outline around the beehive. Cut out a small little door with brown paper and glue it on.

Then with our yellow tempera paint dab, Inigo painted his thumb and stamped it all around the beehive. The paint dries quickly so I draw the little bee’s features!

I totally love how this craft came out….so cute!