ABC Book – Letter F

We have been concentrating on the letter F the last few days. Our library (and I’m sure all libraries have these books or similar ones) has a good selection of simple books about letters and their sounds. We read this one in particular:

It was OK, not the best plot ever, lol, but it did a good job of getting the /f/ sound across.

{If you are wondering why we aren’t going in alphabetical order with our ABC book, it’s because I am too lazy and I’m doing the easy ones first – consonants that normally only have one sound. And we skipped “D” because a small “d” is too similar to a small “b” and I don’t want M to get confused. He hasn’t quite gotten down the “big letter/ little letter” thing. (We call them mama letters and baby letters sometimes – it seems to help!)}
 
Links to the .pdf files for the activity pages are listed at the bottom of this post. If you download them and use them, I’d love to see pictures and hear what you’ve done with them! You don’t have to make an ABC book, you can use them to work on math skills, just for fun, or whatever!

I tried something new this time – instead of just using cardstock, I used a file folder and punched holes in it so it will fit into our binder. It works pretty well and I think I’ll continue to do this with the other letters. It’s nice to be able to take it out of the binder in one piece in order to work on it, instead of taking several pages out.
So here are some pictures of our F pages in our book:
First, our craft page (it’s certainly not original, but feathers are always fun!) – Feathers for F of course:

Then we had a pocket full of things that begin with F:

And then we had a pocket of F songs. The pocket is downloadable at the bottom of this post, and the songs came from the DLTK site, which I love and use quite often. You can find the songs here.

I made a miniature fishes in the fishbowl counting game with a spinner:

A pocket of Flowers to color (these are laminated so M can color them over and over again with his Crayola Window Markers):
And finally, some Frogs to sort by size – Big, Medium, and Small:
M loved the frogs. I guess I forgot to take a picture of him sorting them. His favorite part was naming the “f” pictures and coloring the flowers. He was really interested in the fishbowl game, but lost interest pretty quickly. He didn’t seem interested in the songs, but a couple of days later he started asking me to sing them for him again and now he is singing them himself!

Here are the links to the various files. I’ve listed them separately in case there is only one or two that you would like to use:

Fishbowl game and pocket
Frog Size sorting: frogs, mats, and pocket
Color the Flowers: cards and pocket
F Songs: pocket only
The links to the songs are:
Letter F Song
Do You Know the Flower Man?
A Fishy or a Frog
Enjoy!
Have a beautiful day! :)

Art time – Ice paints

Several weeks ago I made ice cubes in our freezer using water and some tempera paints. I planned to let M paint with them outside some hot summer day. And then I totally forgot about them. I found them a couple of days ago and brought them out for him. It ended up being one of the most fun activities we’ve done in quite a while.
I put some newsprint out on the patio, in case he wanted to paint with them. Well, first he experimented with them, watching them melt in the sun. Then he put some in his little wading pool and watched them float around. Luckily that water was pretty cold so they didn’t melt in there. He brought them back to the patio and moved them around on the paper for a while, and made this:
Then apparently inspiration struck, because he grabbed a paintbrush, dipped it into the puddles of icy paint and began painting…. himself. As in, his body. First it was simply feet, and he made this:
Then, well, he got a little carried away:
Ok, I got in on the action too. I wrote “I *heart* u” on his tummy, and made a funny face on his back. Heh. :) It wasn’t quite so much fun when he decided to paint me, but that’s neither here nor there.
He had a great time, I was surprised at how much time he spent with these simple ice cubes, and how much fun it turned into!
To make them, I just put a baby-spoonful of paint in each part of my ice cube tray, then I ran water from the faucet over them and popped them in the freezer. I may have stirred some of them up with a toothpick, but the paint pretty much settled to the bottom of the ice while they were freezing anyway.
I hope you do this with your little ones! It was so much fun. You will obviously need to be ok with messes (or have a stiff drink nearby), and a swimming pool or hose is a good idea too for clean up time! I actually brought a washcloth out and washed him (no soap) in the pool.
Enjoy! And have a beautiful day! :)