Angry Birds for Preschoolers - Part 2

Can't get enough of our Angry Birds activities? Check these out! They were all a hit.

Matching Angry Birds and Feathers

After a rough attack onto the Bad Piggies, the Angry Birds lost quite a few feathers. Match the feathers with the bird who lost them and count them when you are done. Adrian quickly executed the task thinking it was a good scenario and we then looked at which bird had lost the most and least feathers in the battle.

 

Labeling the Angry Birds

Adrian can't read but labeling makes him feel like he can and it makes him so proud. As such, I used the Angry Birds pictures (1 bird per color) and printed color labels as well. Adrian then had to match the birds with their right color label. At first, he was overwhelmed. I had to show him how to read the words but hiding all the letters except the first one and to then make the letter sound. It then came naturally to him that  the sound "o" came from "orange" and he quickly put the label with the orange bird. 

Pigs and wood sticks

In the latest Angry Birds attack, the pigs lost their houses and would now like to re-build with timber. A number was put down with each pig and a stack of "popsicle" sticks too. Adrian then distributed the timber to each pig. There was just enough sticks for each pig. Numbers ranged from 0 to 20.

Feeding the Angry Birds

I purchased some bird seed and set some down in a bowl with a small measuring spoon. I also put down some homemade Angry Bird pompoms and a number for each of them. The number indicated how many scoops of seed each bird desired. I then asked Adrian who was the most and least hungry.

The Angry Birds pooped!

Well this certainly made Adrian excited. With the Angry Birds pictures printed from Wikia Angry Birds and some Mini Smarties (I guess M&M would work too. I just prefer Smarties), we had the perfect bird poop activity. I put all the mini smarties in a bowl and let Adrian sort by color. He then counted how many poops each bird had made and put the right number above...

Giving water to the Angry Birds

Yep...if the birds are hungry...they're also thirsty. Birds don't drink a lot and sometimes must be fed with a dropper so we used an old medicine dropper, a glass with water and 3 empty applesauce containers as water bowls. The number indicated how many squirts of water each bird needed. Not only is this a math activity but it's also a fine motor one. Squeezing that small dropper to get water in and out is not as easy as it seems for a child. 

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Today, I'm happily linking up to

Living Montessori Now, B-Inspired Mama, I can Teach my Child, No Time for Flashcards, and 123 Homeschool 4 Me.

Angry Birds Week for Preschoolers

Surprise! Yes, I know...This week was supposed to be about the Wild West. All apologies to the ones who have been waiting for posts on the subject. I unfortunately was not very inspired by the subject and couldn't come up with enough activities for a week. As such, I've decided to postpone that thematic until more ideas come my way or until we have a short week of school...:) 

So what did we do this week? We talked about birds. More specifically...Angry Birds. I seriously don't like the idea that Adrian's discovered this game but he loves it and so we allow him a few minutes here and there as a treat. To his delight though, we spent the entire week speaking of the "Bad Piggies" and "Angry Birds".

Counting with the "Bad Piggies"

The Minion Pigs are re-building their houses with rocks after the Birds attacked. Each pig needs a certain amount of rocks for this. Can you help the pigs? And then each pig (made these with pompoms, felt, hot glue and goggly eyes) was set on the table with a number ranging from 0-20. A little bowl filled with river rocks (exact amount of rocks needed) was also sat down on the table. Adrian, 4 years old, had no trouble whatsoever in distributing the building materials. All the piggies got the exact amount they requested.

Matching Angry Birds with their Real Bird Counterparts

While investigating the possibility of an Angry Birds week, I saw Counting Coconuts had similar work. I thought it was a great idea and went ahead and printed a picture of each Angry Bird (forgot the Blue Bird...) and found out what species of bird they each were all inspired by. I then printed a picture of those real birds and set it out. It really is just color matching but you can dig deeper. You can look for differences too. For example, do the real birds really have eyebrows? Are their bellies really a different color? It can turn into a fantasy versus reality discussion easily. You child may even enjoy drawing his own Angry Bird based on a real bird seen in your backyard. For a copy of my matching birds, e-mail me. Otherwise, the clipart was found on Wikia and the real birds were separately looked up for pictures. Their species are listed on Wikia as well if you take the time to click on each colored bird.

Parts of a Bird

Obviously, this is not an Angry Bird but it's a bird and I thought we could welcome all birds to our Angry Birds study. Adrian knew almost all the parts these cards presented. I printed these free cards thanks to Montessori Materials (under Bird Picture Labels). 

Bird Paper plate Craft

This was quite something to do for Adrian. He had to color the dinner paper plate, punch holes (with help) for the legs and insert them in, cut the plate and glue it. It took a while and for a while, he couldn't tell it would ever look like a bird. The cutting part was rough too. Paper plates are more resilient to our Melissa & Doug plastic scissors I'd say! :) Anyhow, I found this craft on My Montessori Journey. Prior to coloring, I drew a black line in the middle of the plate, and then on one of those halves, I drew two more lines. They were guidance for Adrian as to where to cut.  I also pre-colored the beak and cut the pie cleaner in half.

Wrapping him insects

A lot of birds eat insects and that is how I introduced their presence in our Angry Birds week. I found these glittery bugs are our dollar store last year I believe. I also provided pieces of yarn (only had blue in hand...). The activity was to cocoon each bug into the yarn by wrapping them up. It's totally a fine motor activity and it was not easy. See Adrian's work below. It's loose and tangled. We'll have to wrap more! :)

Adrian's Work

Feedings "worms" to the Angry Birds

Cut one pipe cleaner into small pieces and twist them and bend them so they look like little worms. Put them into a tiny bowl, provide a clothespin and voila! I used a regular size clothespin for this. It's more difficult but the smaller clothespins are no challenge to Adrian anymore. Adrian used the clothespin to pick up worms from the bowl and feed them to the birds. As you can see, they were all fed. :) I made these Angry Birds myself using big pompoms, felt, hot glue and goggly eyes. My son LOVED them and the idea that he was taking care of the birds.

Halloween for Toddlers - Part 2

I always feel like Z and I don't do a  lot of activities. I guess we're too busy in the morning. There's playdates, gymnastics, sometimes a photo shoot...Oh well. When we have a "Slow" morning, we do activities. For Halloween, here's what we did...

Halloween Sensory Tub

Z had fun with the tub. She preferred using her hands to feel the black beans and yellow split peas than using the two small measuring spoons provided. She quite enjoyed filling and dumping beans into the Halloween pail. Also used in the tub were some plastic orange spiders, white plastic skulls, a cat figure and some purple twisted pipe cleaners representing worms. Idea for the tub borrowed from Counting Coconuts'.

Coloring a pumpkin

I printed ours from the free printables available on Kidssoup. I provided only an orange triangular crayon from Crayola. She loves coloring and arts in general.

Bowling mummies

I kept three empty "European" (shape is different) soda bottles just for this. We don't drink soda much so I didn't have any more than that on hand but that's ok. I didn't want to waste too much toilet paper on them anyway. After wrapping the bottles with toilet paper, I stuck on some goggly eyes. When the time came, I provided an orange basketball and showed Zahavah how to bowl. She had a blast and laughed a lot every time the mummies dropped to the floor. I saw this idea on MomTimesTwo.

Ghost footprint

Hmmm. Well that didn't go as planned. I never convinced baby to let me paint her foot. :(  I even painted mine and showed her what we'd do but she still decided not to do it. A sad moment indeed. Anyhow, this is a bigger version than what I had planned but it still shows what it'd look like if she'd done the activity. There's always next year! :)

Happy Halloween from Mizzzz Zzzzz the Black Cat

Halloween for Toddlers

Halloween has now come and gone but I still decided to post my toddler's activities. I wish I had posted them sooner so you could do them along but overall, it was a busy week...

Sifting orange spiders from blue craft sand

Just like her big brother, Zahavah also sifted some orange spiders from the sand. She felt most proud when handed "mama's spoon" for the activity. I chose to use blue craft sand to offer a nice contrast to the orange spiders (found at Dollar Store). She did very well with the activity and like it much. I adapted this activity from Counting Coconuts'. 

Making a spider web

Z loves art...especially paint. So one night, I painted a dessert paper plate black (took two coats as it was a glossy one) in prevision for the next day. On activity day, I dropped two small dots of white paint on the plate, and asked Z to add a marble. I then showed Z how to move the plate gently around to get the marble to roll around. She loved it. She quickly learned how to control the marble on the plate so it would roll and not fall off. In the end, we had made a nice white spiderweb and we added one of our orange spiders on top to complete her art.

Stacking bugs

These are perfect for Halloween and made by Lamaze. They rarely get played with but they are really cool. They are magnetic and make it much easier for younger children to stack them (not that Z has any trouble stacking un-magnetized blocks). Z stacked all 6 of them and moved on... :)

Fill and dump

Using small ghost erasers (Dollar Store) and a pumpkin pail (also from the same store), Z filled and dumped the erasers. She loved it and it kept her very busy. She also made a request of repeating the activity everyday...

Halloween stampers

What child doesn't love stamps? Purchased through the Oriental Trading Company, they come in pre-inked purple, orange, green and black stampers. Part of the challenge was for Z to open and close the top. The stamping...well that was just fun. She enjoyed varying the pressure to see the result and as you can see, enjoyed dragging them too to see what would happen. 

Halloween for Preschoolers - Part 4

And so this is my final post on Halloween Week for preschooler Adrian. I hope you've all enjoyed browsing through! :)

Tweezing skulls into pumpkin pail

The little pumpkin pails are always a hit around here. Must be because they are small and seasonal! :) We opted to tweeze-in 1 white plastic skull per pail. Both the skulls and pails were purchased at our local dollar store last year. The challenge was partly picking up a single skull and holding on tight to the tweezers so it would be dropped into a pail. 

Memory Matching Game with Jack O'Lanterns

Matching & memory games are always fun and good for pre-math skills development. I do not have a very great gift at drawing so I printed two copies of these from Frenzy Universe and cut them up. Because a lot of the faces have similar traits, I printed them on paper instead of cardstock. It allowed Adrian to see through ever so slightly and lessened potential frustrations...We started by matching so he could familiarize himself with the jack o' lanterns and finished with the memory game.

History - Previous Halloween costumes

I could have printed these but I thought it would be nice to incorporate computer skills to this activity. I put one Halloween costume picture per year (2008-2011) in a folder and opened up the pictures on the screen overlapping them in no particular order. Adrian had to point to his last Halloween costume using the mouse...all the way to his first costume. After pointing to the costume, he would stick a small post-it on the picture to remember the order.

Life Cycle of a Pumpkin

Printed thanks to Montessori for Everyone. It's very abstract for a child to picture a pumpkin in its earlier stage. Having visited a pumpkin patch, Adrian remembered seeing some green pumpkins and vines though so it helped. Putting them in order was asking too much and I knew it but helping him understand how things grow, now, that's more like it. Next Spring, we shall plant some seeds to watch what happens! :)

How Many Pumpkin Seeds?

Printed a few pumpkins (Acclaim Images), and kept some seeds from a carving to do this one. You know the drill...Roll the die and see how many seeds this pumpkin contained.

Craft - Tissue Paper Candy Corn

Ah...Of course I had no orange tissue paper left...Oh well. I pre-cut strips of tissue paper and showed Adrian how to scrunch them into little balls. He then painted some liquid glue onto the template and stuck the  tissue paper balls into it. Template was found on a blog.

Craft - Pumpkin Paper Plate

Another craft for dexterity development. Tearing isn't easy. I pre-cut some orange construction sheets and Adrian had to tear them. He then painted some glue on and added the trips. We used a dessert plate this time as last time we used a dinner plate and it was too big for his patience! :) He helped me punch a hole and laced the green pipe cleaner in and twirled it around his finger to curl it like a vine. Idea, courtesy of My Montessori Journey!

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Halloween for Preschoolers - Part 3

Did you have a nice Halloween? Did you do any Halloween activities with the little ones? Over here, we had plenty to cover an entire week of fun...all the way to Halloween day.

Making spiders with play doh

Although the spider pictured above is quite cute, it was just an introduction to the activity...which consisted in using a die to see how many legs our spiders would have. We used a small Play Doh container (black colored) and some cut-up black pipe cleaners. Adrian then tossed the die and inserted the right amount of legs into the play doh balls he had made. While doing the activity, the spiders looked like below:

 

Roll a spider leg

Filling in letters

I've been trying to do more literacy activities with Adrian. We read a lot and he knows his letter sounds so I'm trying to encourage a bit more phonetic activities. I thought I'd come up with a little story where the first letter of 4 words (cat, bat, spider and ghost) were missing. But first, Adrian had to figure out where to put the missing letters. I read one paragraph and by hearing the color, he had to pick the right Halloween creature and put it next to the paragraph. After it was done, we went back to the first creature and he had to pick the first letter of it. I based my story on "Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?" by Eric Carle. One of the paragraphs read; " Orange spider, orange spider, what do you see? I see a purple cat looking at me." I, of course, removed the first letter of "spider" and "cat".  Next to this paragraph, Adrian put the spider. Later, he added "s" as well in the open spot. E-mail me if you want your own copy.

Halloween Sensory Tub

Well, the sensory tubs are not as much of a hit as they used to be. My little boy is growing up. Adrian still enjoyed scooping up the black beans and yellow split peas into the pumpkin pail but quickly lost interest. I asked him to count the white skulls, the orange spiders, the cat figures and the purple worms (cut up and twisted pipe cleaners) and then he was all done....

Spider web lacing

The ultimate Halloween decoration! Be sure to use a non-coated dessert paper plate if you do not have black dessert paper plates because this glossy one took two coats of paint and it still didn't adhere right. Anyhow, after turning the plate black, I punched holes here and there. Then Adrian's job was to lace from one side to the other to create a spiderweb design. It was completely counter-intuitive to him. He really wanted to lace the "Right way" as we normally do. :)

Halloween Candy Sorting

A dream come true for most kids. Adrian loved seeing this huge basket filled with candy. I asked him to help me sort so we could have them separated into little baggies for the trick-or-treaters. He did great and even counted each treat kind. I realized that he either really likes candy or need a bigger challenge with counting. He made it up to 29 with no mistakes...Go kiddo!

Magic Witch's Potion - Hunting for Ingredients

Yes! Yet another outdoor hunting activity. This one can be e-mailed to you if you'd like to have your own copy. I made it knowing we'd have these in our big yard. The background story was that Adrian could make a magic potion using these very ingredients to ensure a greater amount of candy collected while trick-or-treating! He took it quite seriously! :)

Happy Halloween from Adrian the Tree Frog

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Halloween for Preschoolers - Part 2

I really missed Halloween this year. It's always a bit sad to live abroad and miss on this cute tradition of dressing up, trick-or-treating and decorating. We still did the best of it and decorated inside and out, bought costumes and yup...went trick-or-treat to the neighbors we know. They told us that Halloween is starting to catch up in Germany and that some kids do trick-or-treat too. We only welcomed 4 at our house but the kids still enjoyed showing off their costumes and getting candy (aka entire chocolate bars!)

Science - Hunting with spider webs

So my son is now at the stage where spider webs are scary. To ease the scariness, I thought we would hunt down those webs for Halloween and remove them if empty. To do so, I handed Adrian an empty spray bottle which we filled with water. I then asked him where he thought we'd find spiderwebs. He knew too well where they usually are in our yard. Every time he thought there might be a web, he'd spray and the web would magically appear. He would then take the witch's broom and remove it gently. The one pictured above was removed later by my husband! Go figure...I'm scared of these critters too! :)

Counting eraser-ghosts

Using our sandpaper numbers from Montessori Outlet. Adrian loves for me to take them out every so often at which point he traces them and then moves on to the activity. I put the exact amount of erasers needed as a self-correcting tactic and took care to mix up the numbers this time to ensure concentration. Adrian quickly corrected his mistake when he ran out of erasers for number 5. Erasers were bought at Target in the dollar bin.

Clothespins on Halloween pail

Great exercise for little fingers in need of fine motor developement. I used a small metal pail purchased at Target and small Halloween clothespins found at Michael's. Adrian then had to decorate the pail by putting the clothespins on the rim. He did great and it looks like the small clothespins are not as challenging as they used to be...

Halloween stamping patterns

Here's a great activity to do with stamps; patterning. I usually create the pattern in front of Adrian and go halfway on the sheet. I then let him complete the sequence I created. We created 7 on this sheet thanks to Oriental Trading Company's Halloween stampers. Adrian is always excited to use stamps so this was really fun for him. I am thinking we'll need to up the challenge now. It's cake to him.

Stringing bats on a twig

Using some of our bats found at the Dollar Store last year. I thought it'd be fun to string them on a twig since bats sleep upside down, you know? Although the twig is small it did have some bumps on it since I plucked off leaves ahead of time so Adrian had to sometimes wiggle the bats around instead of just slide them on. On top of that, holding the twig and sliding on bats added a challenge, especially when he had to pick up another bat from the bowl. After one bat fell off the twig, he quickly learned how to hold the twig when reaching for another bat. Smart kid! :)