Music Time – Songs about Birds

There are so many great bird songs out there, I really could make this an extremely loooong post.  Don’t worry. :)  I’m just going to tell you some of our favorite new songs that we’ve been learning this past week.  And I want to share some wonderful websites to use when looking for songs.

I always go to Little Fingers That Play first.  Deborah has so many good, original, and fun songs that I’m always sure to find something M will love.  We’ve been singing “Three Little Birds” a lot.  I even drew some little birds and a nest for a quick flannel board set to go with it: It is such a catchy tune, I have to admit I sing it a lot even when M isn’t around. ;)

Next, Kididdles is another great place to go for songs.  They have a huge list, and if you sign up (totally free) you can print out song sheets as well as activity sheets to go along with some of the songs.  Many songs also have audio files of the tunes.  I added “Kookaburra”, “Robin in the Rain”, and “The Robin” to our little homemade song and poem book, and we’ve been singing these while we play a variety of instruments.

If you don’t have your own homemade songbook, and are interested in books of songs, Vanessa at Silly Eagle Books has this great list of 100 children’s song books.  We’ve been checking these out at our library – one or two a week – and love them.  Thank you, Vanessa, for putting this list together! :)

One more place where I’ve had good luck in looking for songs is childfun.  The site is a bit awkward to maneuver around in (in my opinion), but they have songs listed for every theme you can imagine.  They also have craft ideas, food ideas, and other activity suggestions too!  We found this cute little action poem/song there:

The Chickadee Song
(Fly your fingers away one by one as you sing this song)

Chorus:
Chickadee, chickadee, happy and gay
Chickadee, chickadee, fly away.

Five little chickadees, no room for more,
One flew away, and then there were four.

         Four little chickadees, sitting in a tree,
         One flew away, and then there were three.

         Three little chickadees, don't know what to do,
         One flew away, and then there were two.

         Two little chickadees, sitting in the sun,
         One flew away, then there was one.

         One little chickadee, can't have any fun.
          He flew away, and then there were none.


Of course there are a ton of other great songs and poems that go with a bird theme… 5 little Ducks, Little White Duck, 2 Little Blackbirds, Robin Redbreast…. etc.
If you have a favorite song about birds, I’d love to hear it!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Sunday School on Friday – Jonah and the Whale

We finally got around to doing another Bible story with actual activities to go with it.  We’ve been reading the stories and talking about them, but I’ve just been completely out of creative ideas to go with any of them.
And, just an FYI, with Advent beginning soon I’ll be preparing for a daily (quick) Bible story with M up to Christmas.  After that we’ll try to get back in the swing of things with a weekly story… my current plan is to start with creation and go from there.  This is what we’ll be doing in Advent too, but after Christmas (or possibly New Year’s) we’ll take more time to do some crafty things on a weekly basis for each story.  Gosh, I hope that makes sense.  My mommy-brain needs some serious sleep. :)
So, last week we talked about Jonah.  Good old Jonah, who is a lot like M in many ways… mainly in the saying “No” way and running the other direction when asked to do something. ;) 
We read two books about whales throughout the week, and the first time we read them I casually mentioned Jonah and his *adventure*.  M was fascinated.  He hadn’t really learned about whales yet, and loved hearing how big some of them can be and that they don’t chew up their food, they just swallow it whole.  Gulp!  For whatever reason, he found this fact astounding.  And Jonah getting spit out?!  Well, you can imagine how cool he thought that was. :) 
The first book was Whales by Gail Gibbons – an excellent book for learning facts about these creatures.
The second book was Baby Beluga, by Raffi.  You have probably heard this song… the book is basically the song with illustrations.  This one was also well-liked. 
Then we read the story of Jonah from our favorite toddler Bible:
And I just (today) found this flannel board set:If you are interested, click on the picture and it will take you to the site.  The pictures are about halfway down the page.  I’m going to make this for M so he can “do” the story on his flannel board.   Of course I searched high and low for something to make at the time we were actually talking about this story and couldn’t find anything… this would have been (and will be) perfect!
Our craft was so much fun for M.  He LOVED it.  I can’t stress that enough.  I thought it was so simple that I would be lucky to get his cooperation for the whole thing, but he really, really loved it! (I like it when that happens!) 
First, he did some color mixing – periwinkle blue and a tiny amount of yellow to make a sea-green (pretend it’s sea-green, ok?) background.  He painted this onto a piece of white cardstock with a square piece of sponge:
I found a coloring page here, printed it on cardstock and cut the whale out.  M colored Jonah with a crayon.  Then he mixed white and purple paint and painted the whale and an oval piece of cardstock that I had cut out.
We let everything dry overnight.  The next day he glued the whale to the sea background, and we attached the oval to the center of the whale with a paper fastener.  This is the whale’s flipper.  I know most whales don’t have flippers right there but this one does. Matthew asks everyone who enters our house, “Do you wanna see Jonah in the big whale?!?” and he flips up the flipper and there sits Jonah, on his knees praying, just waiting to be spit out. :) 
Jonah did the right thing in the end and did what God asked him to do, but I’m not entirely sure that lesson made it’s way into M’s brain exactly the way I hoped it would.  However, I would say this story definitely made an impression on him, and he really does like it – a lot.  And hopefully, eventually he’ll understand the moral of the story too. :)
Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – Oct. 25, 2009

M is 37 months old

We continued with a few apple-themed activities this week that we weren’t able to get to last week…

First Two Little Apples in an Apple Tree poem and mini-flannel board: M has always loved this poem! :)

We read 10 Apples Up on Top by Dr. Seuss (such a great book!!), and did a cute flannel board activity putting apples on a picture of M! They are numbered 1 to 10 and size sequenced too. I have seen this in a few blogs lately, but I can’t honestly say where I saw it first. It was before I started keeping better track of that sort of thing!

We also read The Seasons of Arnold’s Apple Tree, by Gail Gibbons. With this book we used these apple life-cycle cards from Montessori for Everyone. I made them into a little flip book so there would be no end or beginning to the cycle as we went through them a few times.

We also did a fun activity matching apple patterns on a boy’s head. The cards and patterns are from Making Learning Fun. We made them into magnets and did them on a small pan. I saw this at Izzie, Mac & Me.

Notice that green visor? It was in our “pay it forward” gift package from whisperingwhispers at Children Grow, Children Explore, Children Learn. I put it in one of M’s activity containers this week and he had a lot of fun putting race car stickers on it. He wore it for a long time afterwards too! :)

He did his first dot-to-dot page: an apple! I think he did pretty well! It’s in a page protector and he used a dry-erase marker and a piece of felt for an eraser.

We did an A activity for his new ABC book too! Check it out in this post.

M also used his dry-erase marker on a zoo page from a workbook and tried drawing straight lines.

He got in some more fine-motor-skill practice putting this button board together:

And the big hit of the week was this: I made some 3”x3” cards from construction paper, used a black marker to write a letter on each one, and put it in a box with some toothpicks. M picked a letter and a toothpick and, working on the carpet, poked holes along the letter. This was a lot of fun for him and was good for letter identification, letter formation, and fine motor skills (again!). We held them up to the window and saw the light shine through the little holes. I got this great idea from prekinders – that site is full of good ideas! And so many of them are super simple like this!

We learned a fun new song (tune of “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”) from preschooleducation.com:

Once a little appleseed

was planted in the ground.

Down came the raindrops

falling all around.

Out came the bright sun

as bright as bright could be

and the little appleseed

grew up to be an apple tree!

We added motions to it and M wanted to sing it several times. Preschooleducation.com is a great place to find poems and songs!

That’s it for us this week! Next week we will be having some pumpkin fun!! :)

Check here for more tot school posts.

Have a beautiful week! :)

Our Flannel Board – part 3

Well, finally I am getting around to almost finishing up this little flannel board series!  {Part 4 will be the last part – a short one (I promise!) about games and making fun scenes for creative play time.}

Now that M is 3 years old, I’ve noticed he is much more responsive to stories told with the flannel board than he was at a younger age.  In fact, he loves it and will often re-tell a new story himself several times throughout the day and then again when Daddy comes home.  It is so much fun to see!

We don’t have a lot of felt story sets, but I have ideas for several.  Just have to find the time – you know how that goes! ;)

Here are the story sets we currently have (and links to the source, where appropriate):

• Brown Bear, Brown Bear:As you can imagine, this one is popular!  We don’t own the book but we’ve checked it out from the library enough times to have it memorized.  M loves doing this one by himself – the rhythm of the story (more like a chant), is fun in and of itself!  Be sure to check out the link above – Making Learning Fun has a ton of great ideas for this story, not just the felt set!

 

• The story of the first Thanksgiving:This set is really just a grouping of clip art from kizclub.  I used it last Thanksgiving to introduce M to some new words (it was so cute to hear him say “cornucopia”!), and this year I’ll use it to tell a simple story of the first Thanksgiving.

 

• This set is all about feelings:M had a small board book (Sesame Street’s Monster Faces) about feelings and it was the best one I found that labeled feelings in a simple way.  There was absolutely no copyright information anywhere in the book, and since Sesame Street characters are pretty easy to obtain, I had no qualms about just photocopying the pages and attaching them to felt.  These came in very handy when M was in that whiny stage around 14 months or so and we were trying to give him the words to use to describe his emotions.  I’m including this one to give you some ideas for making your own felt sets!

 

• The Little Red Hen (perfect for autumn / harvest time!):

 

• The Nativity: This is a fabulous set for telling the story of Christmas!  Last year M was not that enthralled with seeing the story on the flannel board, but he enjoyed playing with the figures!  This year I know we’ll get a lot of use out of this one, and I’m excited!

 

• Another Bible story – Jesus and the Children:This is one I simply threw together to go with the Bible story… I used clip art I found online and some online coloring pages too.  I’m sorry I don’t have the links to any of them.  I’m including it because even though it’s not as nice-looking as some of the sets, it is one of M’s favorites.  He loves telling this story and he really does not care that the size of the disciples is totally out of proportion to Jesus, or any of the other minor details that bothered me about it when I made it.

This brings me to a related topic that I would like to mention… 

Flannel board stories are fabulous especially for telling Bible stories.  They help the story come alive for the child.  I’ve really seen this with M.  Whenever we have a felt set to go along with a Bible story (or any kind of visual aid like story sequencing cards) I’ve noticed he comprehends and just enjoys the story so much more!  He also goes back and reviews the story over and over again if the pieces are left out for him. 

I am very disappointed that there are not more free resources online for Bible story felt sets.  I’ve found a few, which I’ll link to at the end of this post, and if you know of any, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

I am going to enlist my husband’s help for making future felt sets for Bible stories – he is not an artist, but he does have quite a bit of talent when it comes to drawing – and I hope to make them downloadable here for any of you that might want to use them too!  This will be a work in progress, but if there are any specific Bible stories you’d like to see, I’d love to know about it!  Please feel free to comment or email me!

LINKS TO RESOURCES I’VE COME ACROSS:

• Sparklebox has several Bible story resources on this page.  These include some sets that can be used for storyboards or flannel boards, as well as some cards that are great for story sequencing
• Making Friends has several paper doll-style printables here that could be adapted for flannel boards.  They also have some great Bible story craft ideas!
• Browse through Christian Preschool Printables for a few great felt set and story aid ideas.
• Danielle’s Place is not the easiest site to navigate, but if you have time, it’s well worth looking through – she has quite a few free printables that would work for felt sets.
• Look through DLTK’s Bible section for crafts, coloring pages that can be made into felt sets, and other ideas.

Any others you know of?  Share them in the comments!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – Oct. 4, 2009

 M is 37 months old

We had a very laid back week.  I am working on getting some tot trays / workbox-type things set up that M can work on independently throughout the week, but they are a work in process and nothing is where I want it to be yet. 
M surprised me by finding things to do on his own this week anyway – most of which were never captured on camera.  He strung beads and pasta, played with his Lite Brite, laced up some lacing cards, and played with some of his favorite flannel board sets.  My husband had Monday off, and they played Bingo, tried playing checkers, and read a lot of books together.  They also got out their binoculars and did a little out-the-window bird watching.  Here they are mommy-watching :)
Tuesday was an absolutely glorious fall day and we ventured outside (with the binoculars of course).  M grabbed his “nature basket” and trotted off:
You can see our yard is still mostly green.  There is one tiny patch of leaves turning colors in an oak tree: I’ve been hoping to gather up some beautiful leaves for an autumn leaf identification project, but Mother Nature is not cooperating with me.  Actually I should be happy that the leaves aren’t turning yet, it means winter is still a little ways off.  M grabbed a branch blown down by the wind gusts we’ve been having and tried his best to knock some leaves down for me.
No luck, so he started building with some logs -
Another look around with the binoculars(by the way, I got these at Target for $1.00 – awesome deal!) :
We did do some fun school stuff inside too, continuing with the autumn theme…
We learned a new poem and a new song.  I found both at preschooleducation.com.  The song (to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell”):

The leaves are falling down,
The leaves are falling down,
Red, yellow, orange and brown,
The leaves are falling down.

And the poem, which M absolutely LOVED and did over and over again…

5 little leaves so bright and gay
Were dancing about on a tree one day.
The wind came blowing through the town,
And one little leaf came tumbling down.
(Continue with the remaining 4 leaves)

We did this with 5 silk craft leaves (Dollar Tree!).  I held them up, made them dance around, then M was the wind and blew and I would let one fall.  This was a huge hit!  He then held the leaves and I blew them, then he asked for all the craft leaves, and his silly mama gave them to him and eventually this happened:
Look closely and you can see a couple of them still in mid-air. :)
We also tried  doing these harvest pattern strips from filefolderfun.com:
He is just not *getting* patterns at all.  So I gave up and made it into a quick file folder matching game to put on a tot tray for him.  There are several more pattern strips, these two are just the ones we tried doing.
We did a fun autumn matching game – played concentration style.  He did great with this.  I can tell he is really starting to get better at the memory games.  The cards were printed from DLTK.
We also did a flannel board story about the Little Red Hen (I associate it with harvest time).  This set was found here:

And we made a cute autumn wreath:

That’s it for us for this week!  I so enjoyed taking it easy and not trying to fit too much in.  We both had more fun just being together. :) 

Check out what other moms are doing with their tots here!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Our Flannel Board – part 2

(Part 1 of this series is here)

Before I get started, I want to correct a mistake in last week’s flannel board post. I wasn’t sure I had the correct measurements of the foam core board I used to make our flannel board, and I was too lazy at the time to go measure the silly thing. I have done so since then and it is approximately 20” by 30”. It seems to be the perfect size, and the foam core board works wonderfully so far (close to 3 years now)!

I just love making felt sets for M to use with our flannel board. You can find many templates online, draw your own, print out pictures to use, or even clip images from magazines and back them with felt! I’ve done this to create puzzles for M to put together on the flannel board. And, anything you do for the flannel board can be done for a magnet board too! It’s fun to switch things up a little bit sometimes and have some magnet sets that you use on a cookie sheet!

M played with the (very few) felt sets we had when he was small, then lost interest for a time being. I would say he regained interest (and boy, it was a LOT of interest) when he was about 2 1/2 years old. At this stage, many children are intrigued by the way you can *see* a story unfold by using the flannel board.
They also love poems and songs that have manipulatives (the felt pieces) that they can use to bring the songs to life. Poems and songs are a big hit here, in part because they are short and easy to memorize, so M can “do” the flannel board by himself.

And I love the counting poems we have! It’s great to see M learning to count and even learning to subtract or add as pieces are added to the board or taken off.

Pictured below are our poem and song felt sets. When appropriate, I’ve linked the title to the site where I found the templates. You can find more templates and ideas at these sites too, so be sure to click over!

5 Green and Speckled Frogs:

5 Little Seashells:
There’s no link for this one because it was a freebie as part of a membership at The Mailbox.com (which I no longer have). However, the shells and wave are super-easy to make and here’s a link to a poem that goes with them. It’s not the exact same poem we use, but it is cute!

5 Little Pumpkins:(um, yes, there are only four pumpkins here and no gate. This one still needs a few finishing touches, but the pumpkins are just so pretty, aren’t they?)

 

5 Little Ducks:


10 in the Bed (This one was made by printing the pieces, laminating them, attaching sandpaper to the back of the bed, and putting velcro pieces on the pillows and the backs of the bears):


Old MacDonald Had a Farm (also made by printing and laminating!):

There’s a Little White Duck:

Polka-dot numbers 0 – 20 :
We use this for number recognition and number sequence, playing a kind of Brown Bear, Brown Bear game – We’ll put #1 up and say “number one, number one, what do you see?” “I see a number two looking at me”, etc. M has to find the correct number and put it on the flannel board. Often, I will put them out on the floor pretty much in sequence to make it easier for him. Occasionally we mix them up a little bit. Sometimes I have him recite the poem and see if he can get the numbers in order. Right now we only use 0-10, as that seems to be enough for him to deal with at one time.

2 Little Apples: I made this one myself – simply cut a trunk and tree top out of brown and green felt. Make two apples with faces (if you wish) and you’re done. Here’s the poem that goes with this one in case you are unfamiliar with it:

Way up high in the apple tree,
I saw two little apples looking at me.
I shook that tree as hard as I could,
Down came the apples,
and mmmm, mmmm, were they good!

When M was a tiny baby I would recite this poem for him like this:

Way up high in the apple tree,
I saw a little baby looking at me!
I shook that tree as hard as I could (gently, gently “shake” baby, without really shaking him at all),
Down came the baby,
and mmmm, mmmm, was he good! (eat him up, but don’t really eat him up, ha ha).

He always giggled with that one! :)

Next week (hopefully) part 3 – telling stories with the flannel board and how I (try to) keep them organized.

Have a beautiful day! :)