ella's stickers

Flexible.  Such an important word.  Right up there with compromise.  Important for children - but also for adults.  Today I let Ella choose some stickers for an art project.  She loved some pretty embossed flowers.  She loved them so much, in fact, that she wanted to take them home.  Intact.  All of them :)
That may not have been an option for me in the classroom but it is an option this year.  I'm glad.

Reusable Number Book

Ella had so much fun making her own number book.  To make this project you need:  7 sheets of laminated card stock, assorted stickers, dry-erase crayons, and a Sharpie.

I numbered the pages with the Sharpie.  Ella used her dry-erase crayons to copy and added the correct number of stickers to each page.  Because the book is laminated,  you can erase the crayon and peel off the stickers so the book can be used over and over again.  I had the book bound at a copy shop for $1.50 but you could just hole punch pages and use a book clip to hold the pages together.

alphabet blocks

We are reviewing the alphabet this month and I thought it would be fun for Ella to make her own alphabet blocks.  I bought photo cubes (in the scrapbook aisle of Michael's) to use for this project.  For each letter of the alphabet, Ella affixes an alphabet sticker and draws a picture of something that begins with that sound.  I add the word for her because the print needs to be small.

Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head

I'm not usually attracted to plastic toys - but there are exceptions . . .  I love Mr. Potato Head.  There is something really cool about all of the possibilities that those funny bulbous bodies and all of their limbs offer.  Today, Ella and I dumped out the Mr. Potato Head bucket and had fun sorting and counting body parts before we started a Mr. Potato Head assembly line.

trying something new

Last year, in the classroom, Ella rarely ventured into the block area.  Housekeeping was pretty much where she wanted to be each and every day.  Now that she is in a home setting this year, I thought it might be nice if she had an opportunity to check out all that blocks have to offer.  I have a decent set of unit blocks and two sets of natural blocks (that still look like the tree they came from).  We've been talking about houses and I asked Ella if she'd like to try building a house for some of our dolls and animals.  She came up with this gorgeous "tree house".  She was really engaged for almost an hour, arranging and making patterns, deciding where dolls and furniture might go.

Piggies by Audrey and Don Wood

Today we read one of our favorite books - Piggies by Audrey and Don Wood.  It's such a playful book with lovely full-of-detail illustrations.  When we finished reading, I gave Ella some piggies (that I found in a February 1999 issue of Mailbox magazine) to watercolor.  As we waited for them to dry, we painted her hand and made a handprint.  Once the watercolor paint dried, Ella added details to the pigs with colored pencils.  We cut the pigs out and added them to the fingers on her handprint.

house of cards

I have such fond childhood memories of creating elaborate card houses all over my grandmother's living room floor with my brother.  Yesterday we made card houses from card stock . . .  I pre-cut colored cardstock into 6 x 3 sheets and then cut half inch slits around the edges.  Ella decorated the cards with stickers (you could also use markers or paint) before building her house.