The Letter E

Ok, a quick post on our letter Ee week is in order.  If I didn’t you wouldn’t see the pumpkins the girls got to paint!
Monday was all about exercise.  We talked about how we take care of our bodies and as soon as Cairn mentioned running and playing I jumped at it and turned the conversation to exercise and all of its different forms.  I really tried to emphasize how when ever they play and move their whole body they are exercising… so exercise is active play.  And for the rest of the day that’s just what we tried to do.
We played with Ernie pretending to swim in this video:

Then we went outside to play a jumping, froggy, letter Ee game.  I drew a lot of lily pads on the patio with letters inside of them (mostly big and little Ee’s with a smattering of other letters).  The kids then had to jump only on the letter Ee to get across.  I even threw in some rules after a few hop throughs that they had to say if they were on a big E or a little e.  They loved it!
 


After snack they colored a revised worksheet and ran outside to hop some more on the lily pads.  Quite often they chose the furthest possible lily pad to jump to instead of little hops much closer – these frogs were amazing!







Wednesday we talked about another Ee word – emotions or feelings.
I stole some emotion-wrought faces from the internet (I can’t find the exact ones I used right now, but there’s a ton out there), cut them out and had them face down.  The kids took turns flipping them over and we talked about each emotion, and made the faces and sounds that go with it.  When we got through them all I asked which ones were good feelings and then what we do when we have the bad feelings.  That led into reading the book Mouse was Mad which is just a great book since it teaches small kids to be silent when throwing a tantrum… or it could teach parents that it’s ok to tell kids they’re throwing the tantrum wrong…  Anyways, mouse gets so angry that he stands absolutely perfectly still and that helps calm him down.
Then we did an activity that was such a hit with Cairn and Rebekah last year that I just couldn’t wait to do it again:  We had kids inside and outside looking at each other through the window.  They had to take turns making a face so the other could trace that emotion with a dry erase marker right onto the window.  They turned out some masterpieces!  And I really did try to get a photo of it, but none of them turned out… so you’ll just have to try it yourself to see what fun this activity is!
After snack time every one got to choose a little pumpkin to paint an emotion on it.  Well, that was the plan.  Once they had the paint and pumpkins they all decided to just paint it.  All.
Following are the painting pictures and the finished product, enjoy!