Need a COOL way to practice COLORS? Check out these amazing Snowman Color cards! I love the bright colors!
Grab pom-poms, a pair of tongs, and this FREE printable and start the learning I mean FUN!
Your little will work on fine motor skills and grip strength as they pinch the tongs and carry the pom-pom to the cards. Place the pom-poms on the snowflakes and talk about color matching, sorting, visual discrimination, and counting!
You can use the entire rainbow of colors, or just one or two colors at a time. You can even have your child place colored blocks, beads, or stickers on the snowflakes!
My daughter still calls this color “lell-low” and there is something so endearing about it that I hope no one ever corrects her!
Pull out the colors your child struggles with and focus on those cards. This is a fun way to seek and find the colors in the pile of pom-poms.
Make it a little “competition” which snowman card will fill up first?!
And check out those 2 different shades of green pom-poms! This is a great time to talk about color variations!
Such a simple activity that has tons of benefits! I cannot wait to hear how you use it!
I love activities that let creativity and imagination bloom!
Check out this super fun Christmas activity! Your readers can decorate their own Christmas tree and let their own creativity run wild all while developing their hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills. In fact, you can even sneak in a little color and shape learning!
Decorating your own Christmas tree doesn’t take special materials or even superior creativity. Pull out what you have:
markers
crayons
paint
stickers
string
paper shapes
buttons
ribbon
glitter (if you are super brave 🤣)
Anything goes!
The best way to inspire my kiddos creativity is to first read and then have them complete the activity. I love these classic Christmas stories and both feature decorated trees to inspire your readers.
This activity is super versatile. You can print the FREE printable (on white or colored paper!) and decorate right on the paper or you can cut out the tree, decorate, and glue it onto a bigger collage. The options are endless!
We read Christmas stories at our community story time this week and then the kiddos completed this activity. I always love seeing what they will come up with. Each tree is as unique as the artist who created it!
I love that these activities make wonderful festive decorations!
If you have followed my blog for any amount of time, you know that I adore playdough. I love the texture, smell, and versatility. It is my favorite “surprise activity” to calm down rambunctious kiddos or focus free spirits.
Playdough mats are a wonderful way to inspire your readers’ creativity!
One of our favorite Christmas activities is decorating cut out cookies and taking them to all our neighbors. The kids love the cookie cutters, colorful icing, and sprinkles! For our Christmas in July theme I decided to take that same idea and turn it into a playdough activity that can be done anytime. Check out this fun cookie plate full of cookies ready to be decorated! And no baking necessary!
Pull our different colors of playdough (or get super fancy and make your own!!) , cookie cutters, and tools. Then, get to work! I love that their creations are different every time. The uniqueness and creativity is my favorite part!
I highly recommend laminating your playdough mats so that the playdough doesn’t stick to the paper.
PRO TIP – print this free printable playdough mat and one of our other Christmas playdough mats. Then, put the pages back to back before using your laminator. Now you will have a 2-sided play dough mat that will keep your kiddos busy for hours!
Dragons are one of my favorite fairy tale creatures. They are powerful and diverse – sometimes friendly, sometimes misunderstood, sometimes villainous. I love trying to guess what type of dragon will be featured in a new book!
Retelling stories can help our little ones exercise their imaginations, learn story building concepts, enhance reading comprehension, and organize and describe events. Creating props like this fire breathing dragon makes the retelling all the more fun! You don’t just TALK about the dragon, you get to BE the dragon!!
The supplies are pretty simple. You NEED a paper cup and tissue paper or streamers for the “fire”. The rest of the embellishment is up to you! We covered our paper cup in colored paper and sticker “scales”, but you could color, paint, or even glitter yours!
We began by cutting down the streamers. I cut the strips to length then split them in half to make the fire fan out easier. However, aesthetically I like the streamers cut in half, but I think this required extra air to make them blow at the end.
I also cut the ends into points. Again, it was all about aesthetics.  😂 Make your dragon your own by using different colors for the fire!
Next, use a pencil or pen to poke a small hole into the base of the cup. This is where your little one will breathe “fire” into the dragon at the end of the activity.
At this point, your little one will categorically refuse to make her dragon green as previously decided. Instead, she will insist that you get all new “scales” and “skin” in BLUE because that’s her FAVORITE.
If this has never happened to you, you probably don’t even have kids! LOL!
She really wanted to help make her dragon so we started with a glue stick and paper. However, our cup has a slippery coating so the glue stick didn’t stick as well as I liked. We ended up adding several pieces of Scotch tape to the outside before adding the stickers.
Next, tape the “fire” to the inside of the cup.
And then, attach the “eyes”.
How cute?! Your little one now blows through the hole at the base of the cup to make the streamers blow. Voila! They become instant fire breathing dragons!!
Curious about this book? Find out more and check out a sneak peek inside HERE
Becoming a fire breathing dragon is always fun, but it is even more exhilarating when you get to be the fire breathing dragon, in your favorite book, while your mom reads to you!
Have fun pairing your activity with your favorite dragon book! I cannot wait to see what you come up with!
Calling all princes, princesses, kings, and queens!! Hear ye, hear ye! By royal decree, you will now create your own royal crown! 👑
Whether your little one dreams of being a fairy tale princess or Prince of the Cheetah Cats, their imagination can soar and their creativity can take charge with this activity!
The materials are very simple and you can substitute anything you have on hand to make it unique! Cut out a crown shape. (You can use my FREE printable if you want!) Then encourage your little one to make it their own. Add in stickers, paper shapes to glue on, crayons or markers, buttons, gems, even glitter if you are feeling super brave! Anything goes!
And if you are planning this activity for your community story time, you will need to repeat the cutting process over and over again…. 🤪
But look at all those fun rainbow colors!!! I printed my template onto colored card stock to give it extra weight. I also like starting with colored car stock because it lets each kiddo make something in their own favorite color.
Check out all those little fingers hard at work! Each crown as as unique as the kiddo who created it!
When the kiddos were done decorating we used a hole punch to punch a hole on each side of the crown template. We then used a piece of yarn to tie it into a crown. The yarn is an easy way to make it adjustable, but I do recommend using a double thickness of yarn to give your crown a little more durability.
Our finished works!
Now we are donning our crowns and off to imagine a brave new world full of adventure, intrigue, mystery, dragons, fairies, and more!
Need a rainy day activity or a quiet activity to help pass that scary antic-packed hour as you make dinner? Outer Space Matching Game to the rescue!!
Matching games can help little ones with visual recognition, train their visual memory, improve concentration and attention to detail, and increase short term memory. Memory games can also be used to increase classification and grouping skills!
You can grab the FREE printable HERE and then start playing! I chose to laminate my sheets before cutting to make them more durable, but that step is totally optional!
I love all the vocabulary you can learn from this Outer Space Matching Game, too! It can be the jumping off point for so much space-themed conversation! Or, better yet, use this to reinforce concepts that you have already read about!
If you have a younger child you can start introducing matching games by using fewer cards and keeping them face up. As they get quicker at these 6 pairs, then you can rotate in new matches. Or try turning these familiar cards face down to see how they do!
Did you miss the FREE printable with the matching game cards? You can grab it HERE now!
Once unexpected perk of playing this matching game in our house is that our little lady is learning what “taking turns” actually means. She thought she could keep turning over cards until she found her match, but big brother had a very different opinion about that! It led to great conversation about what our house rules would be.
Want to check out another fun themed matching game? Find my Under the Sea Matching Game HERE!
Want to give your kiddo a leg up before Kindergarten? Or refocus your 1st and 2nd grader before school gets back in session? These number rockets are just the tool to help you!
🚀 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…. BLASTOFF!!! 🚀Â
I love this #SpaceWeek activity because it is so versatile! Each rocket is comprised of three sections – the top is a domino counting piece, the middle is a numerical digit, and the bottom is a ten-frame.
I had no idea how prevalent ten-frames were in current curriculum trends until my kiddo went to Kindergarten. They started with ten-frames almost immediately and continued to use them throughout the year. I love that this activity can reinforce digit recognition, counting, grouping, and more!
Grab the FREE printable HERE and you will be all set to launch!
I printed mine out in three colors to make the activity extra colorful. You will need 1 sheet of paper for the top of the rocket, 2 sheets of paper for the middle of the rockets, and 2 sheets of paper for the bottom of the rockets. That’s 5 sheets of paper total if you are still trying to do the math 🤪
This printable covers numbers 1-10 and is a great reinforcement for kiddos learning to count, group, and work with numbers in various forms.
The bottom of the rockets are a bit tedious to cut out, but look how amazing they look when finished! You could totally laminate the sheets of paper before cutting to give some prolonged durability.
Did you miss the FREE printable? Grab it HERE now!
Everyday comparison to your reader learn the scale of the planets in our solar system
As we were reading all our books for #SpaceWeek I ran across this amazing comparison. Did you know that you can show the scale of the planets with FRUIT?! 🤯🤯🤯
My kiddos are pretty young to digest the size and scope of the universe…. Let’s be real, I am too young or finite to understand the size and scope of the universe! Comparing the size of each planet to a piece of fruit was the perfect thing to give all of us a reality check!
With fruits that I have on hand (and one or two extras grabbed at the local grocery) we were able to line up the planets in their distance from the sun order.
Mercury and Earth are approximately the same size – the size of a grape or small cherry tomato. Venus and Mars are the size of a blueberry, but I couldn’t buy just 2 blueberries so I grabbed some dried cranberries to fill those spaces.
Jupiter was everyone’s favorite. It is so GIANT in comparison to the rest. Plus then we served the watermelon to our Community Group and my daughter went around saying “Did you know you’re eating Jupiter?” It got lots of confused looks and laughs as she explained the project we had done!
Saturn is a large grapefruit, Uranus is an orange, and Neptune an apple. All very approachable and easy to find foods!
Check out my little fact checker measuring to see if I picked tomatoes that were the correct size 😂
Space Week is turning out to be a huge learning opportunity for me! I am fully embracing the challenge and wonder that come with new discoveries! A sweet friend told me of all kinds of local activities that would go with our Space Week theme so stay tuned to see how many of those we can incorporate this week! We might need a longer space unit soon!
We are reading tons of fun space-related books this week. One thing most have in common…. a countdown to a BLAST OFF! This fun activity can help your reader imagine they are blasting off to space in their own rocket!
Materials:
Grab your FREE Flutter Ribbon Rocket printable HERE
Markers, crayons, or pencils to color your design
Scissors and tape
Streamers in fiery colors
A string and a stick (we used a lollipop stick from a hobby store! It was the perfect length for little hands!)
Once you grab your free printable, let your little reader go crazy coloring their unique design. I love that the rockets are as original as the kiddos who make them!
Then, help your little to cut out the rocket ship.
Now let your little use tape or glue to fix the streamers to the bottom of the rocket. I like keeping the streamers pretty long so that there is a lot of “fire” swirling around as they play. Just remember, you don’t want your reader stepping on and tripping on the streamers!
Next, tape the string to the top of the rocket (or punch a hole and tie it!) and tape the other end of the string to the stick.
Check out these 2 amazing rockets that these sweet kiddos made at story time this week! I loved seeing all the rockets flying all around the room!
Flying them outside is even more beautiful! A little bit of wind and your rocket will get picked up like a kite!
Bonus – they are the perfect decoration for our bookshelf while not in use!
How fun is this? I cannot wait to hear what adventures your reader goes on while racing their personal Flutter Ribbon Rocket around!
Did you miss the FREE printable Flutter Ribbon Rocket? Click HERE to download now!
Have you ever been so excited about teaching your kids something and then, the more you research projects, the more you realize you know NOTHING about the subject?!?!
No? Just me? HA!
I am totally that way with #SpaceWeek. I am fascinated with space but the more that I read, the more I realize I know very little about space. I mean I know the basic sun, stars, moon, and a handful of planets, but ask me to put them in order of size or distance from the sun and I am stuck. Then add in things like meteors, comets, nebula, and asteroids and I am totally at a loss.
Outer space is packed with the most fascinating things. And to think there are more rocks, constellations, orbits, and galaxies to still explore. I am totally enthralled!
To help you brush up on your space lingo I created this fun Outer Space Word Search for you. It is packed with all kinds of fun things we will talk more about this week.
My son has informed me that there are too many words 🤣, but I love a good challenge. I am looking forward to working on it this afternoon over a fresh cup of coffee!
Happy Word Hunting!
P.S. Did you miss the printable?? HERE it is again! 😉
Blossoms and Bookworms 