Miss Powers Creative Classroom: The First 13 Days

The first 13 days seemed to move sloooooow, but also flew by. I just thought I would share one of my favorite parts of each day that helped me make it through. I decided to choose a book each day to read and create or find a project to go with it. Something that would be fun, engaging, and help the kids practice fine motor skills whether it be gluing, cutting, writing, or coloring so I could gauge what I'm working with. Here are a few of my favorites (and the kids faves of course).

Elmer - I might've been feeling a bit over zealous with this one, but I wanted to practice listening skills by having them following along a few squares at a time to color Elmer correctly. It was interesting to see who could follow along and who couldn't.

Who doesn't love Laura Numeroff books?! So far we've read If You Take A Mouse to School and If You Give a Mouse A Cookie. We brainstormed what our mouse would ask for if we took him to school. Their ideas cracked me up. This one below said glasses, but there were plenty of interesting ones!

We did circular maps and tear art cookie making for this one. This project just makes me want to eat cookies honestly. lol

Why is every child obsessed with Pete the Cat? lol I know why. Because those songs are so flippin catchy! I love Pete. We did many fun extensions for Pete; such as, acting out every book with props, but here are pics of our daily projects. By the way, PeteTheCatBooks.com

has all of the books available as animated videos!

Pete the Cat and the Missing Cupcakes. This one came at the perfect time, because it was on a birthday of one of the kid's so he actually had brought cupcakes in!

Pete the Cat Rocking in My School Shoes. The kids loved this one and thought it was super silly. I made it up at the last minute lol so Pete has no body oops!

I found this project online somewhere, super cute to go along with Pete the Cat I Love My White Shoes, which might be my favorite book about Pete!

Pete the Cat Five Little Ducks. This one also came at perfect timing, because our story of the day in our curriculum was, The Ugly Duckling. So the duck theme kinda tied together. After reading this story, I taught them the song and we did a retell using the foldable and then we did a reenactment lol I love when the act out the books.

The actors and actresses in 5 Little Ducks lol including the hill who was super serious about his job!

I love Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons, because it's just so easy to come up with a ton of extension activities to go along with it. We did some button number challenges with our own mini t shirts and buttons, practicing counting.

We also made our favorite color button graph, counted, and discussed most, least, same. I was stoked that the graph turned out with a wide variety of buttons and columns.

Pete the Cat and His Magic Sunglasses. We did this one the morning of the Eclipse! We are learning about the words "I can" so the kids traced or wrote "I can" on one lens and then drew something they can do in the other lens. I wrote what they can do. These turned out so cute.

We also did a cute project I found on TpT to make the sun and moon orbiting around the Earth as a hands on way for the kids to see how the Eclipse actually works. Then I had an awesome parent jimmy rig the glasses onto paper plates so my kids could view the Eclipse. I wish we had more than 80% view, but it was still amazing to see.

After viewing the Eclipse we came inside and drew a picture of what we saw and then wrote the sentence "I can see the sun".

We acted out The Little Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Books. This was hilarious. The kids in the "show" all had a piece of something the lady ate and then when it was their turn, they'd put it in the little old lady's belly haha so fun.

We also made our own retelling puppet bags to sequence the story ourselves.

Classic project I do every year after Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. I write their names with chalk onto black paper, give them lots of random colored paper, and tell them to tear art their names. They end up looking so beautiful and colorful and it is great for fine motor. However, I totally forgot to take a picture of them all completed!

I figured I'd let the kids tackle Push Pin letters/words. Our word of the week is I. So the kids all laid on the carpet in a big giant rectangle and push pinned their I's. Afterwards, they were so excited to hold them up to the light to reveal their I. I think this was the quietest 10 minutes in 13 days. I see much more of this activity in the future lol.