Showing posts with label Father's Day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Father's Day. Show all posts
Here's what happens when you do Father's Day crafts for Sunday School:  You do Father Fun on actual Father's Day which means the blogging comes a tad late...

Oh, well...we can always pin and save for next year, right??

Last year, I blogged about Father's day in my first grade classroom {which we are able to do early! :)}.  No need to reblog all of that fun stuff again, but I did want to post Cooper's dad writing from this year {just for my personal benefit!}
Watching Cooper love his daddy just makes me love his daddy even more! :)

Friday, Cooper and I worked on a "sumprise" for daddy!  We used the tie writing {newly added to my Father's Day packet} and wrote what daddy is and isn't.  Note...Cooper is two...this was a little difficult for him language wise.  I have another version that is my dad can/can't and I think that would've been less abstract and easier for him to understand.  Just keep that in mind when doing this with the littles....

I wanted some cute way to display the tie writing, but this was just a random project on the Friday before Father's Day...which meant I had to just use what was on hand!  Had I worked a little a head of time, I would've let him go pick out some scrapbook paper to use for shirts at Hobby Lobby.  Usually I have scrapbook paper around the house, but I didn't have any that look "dress shirty!" So...  I let Cooper pick out the color shirt.  Then we folded the paper to look like a dress shirt.  Here are the steps if you are unsure...
1. Turn the paper landscape.
2.  Cut about 3 inches or so down from the top/middle of the paper.

3. Fold one half from the cutting point down to make a triangle.  The triangle should go from the end of the collar to the corner of the paper.

4. Fold the corner back to make the shoulder.
 ....and the back...

Next, we made daddy's face with what we had.  I had this plan to have a pre made, precut nose, eyes, mouth and ears for him to glue on daddy's face where they belong...you know, kinda like a Mr. Potato Head...but, alas, my stubborn two year old had better plans.  "I dwaw it myself, Mommy!"  So...easy decision!  We just let the two year old do it himself!  And daddy and I got the biggest giggles out of how Cooper "sees" daddy!  Everything you see, is what Cooper insisted that he add to daddy.  He added the brown blob nose, the red squiggle mouth, and the brown stray mark beard hairs.  He did let me precut hair for him and he glued it all the way around.  And he requested tiny beard hairs to cut also!  So fun to watch his creativity!  Of course, we didn't have big enough wiggly eyes on hand, but that's okay too!  This is a memory more than a piece of perfection.  And that's really what's important in the end!
 Um, yeah...and daddy was a little offended that he's not funny! *wink*

With my pre-k babies in Sunday School, we made a shirt and tie card.  Here is my example:

Each kiddo picked out a tie that I had already cut out.  They colored them, and we glued half of it to one half of the shirt (so it would still open up!).

Then, we glued buttons on the shirt too! Here's Coop's card....

The card is preprinted inside and the kids just signed their names.

Catch all of these fun activities in my Father's Day Packet!



My life has been filled with all kinds of crazies: from wedding showers, to graduation parties, to end of the year evaluations at school, to finalizing grades, to getting our house sold.  Phew! Blogging has taken the back seat the last two weeks...

So here's a little bit of what we've been up to in Room 210 between grades and such!

There are those lessons that you plan out in your head and they turn out better than you could've ever imagined...

For me this week, those were the Father's Day lessons!

Last week was the week before Mother's Day and we worked on making all kinds of special goodies for mom. {You can read all about it here.}

So, this past week we worked on goodies for Dad!  Since we don't have school on Father's Day {thank. goodness.}, we made gifts for dad before the end of the year.  I think it's easiest to just do it the week after Mother's Day and connect the two.  We wrote about dad, just like we did mom, and of course they turned out precious!


Then, we made a "wise guy" card for dad.  The kids REALLY loved making their owl their own.  They got to choose the wings and belly pattern and really got into adding details and settings around their owls.  I've done this project with my Sunday School preschoolers a few times, but it was fun doing it with my firsties because they were able to add more details than 3 and 4 year olds and the owls just took on personalities of their own!

This daddy must be a "night owl." Ha!

And this little boy told me his dad loves listening to music!  Can you tell??

You can find all of these cute ideas, masters for the owl craft, plus more crafts for Dad in my I *heart* Dad Pack!  On Father's Day, I'll be doing some more crafts with my Sunday School babies, so I'll post about more Father's Day fun then.  Follow me on blog lovin' or Facebook so you won't miss it!

You can also click HERE to purchase the Mom and Dad Packets together at a discounted price.

Then, THEN, there are those lessons that you plan out in your head just perfectly and they turn out, well...let's just say the wheels start to completely come off the train and you are just left wondering, "What just happened?"

For me this week, that was my measurement lesson!

I don't know about you, but this time of year, I'm working harder than usual to find laying-on-the-floor-projects.  Seriously.  We do a lot of hands on in our room, a lot of group work, etc, but it May it seems like I always try to kick it up a notch because it takes SOOOOO much more to keep them engaged!!  Even simple buddy reading is much better laying on the floor!

So, during math this week, we worked on some "Royal Measurements."  This was the perfect math tie in to our Cinderella Unit we're chest deep into right now!  The objective for this activity was for students to see that there is a purpose for standard measurement.  They were supposed to be able to see this because the glass slippers and the crowns they measured with were different sizes.  So, when they measured their pencils, they would get 2 completely different measurements for slippers and crowns.

Well, that was the idea anyway...

What I found out quickly, was that we really needed to back up AGAIN and talk about how exactly to measure.  When the kids measured the little things they did great!


But when it came to measuring the desks and their friends, it completely bombed!

I purposefully did not give them enough slippers or crowns to measure their friends so that they would have to problem solve.  I was hoping they would discover the need for iteration or reusing the same units over and over to measure, but it failed in a BIG way.  I had kids measuring with slippers and crowns together.  I had kids using their fingers to "jump" the rest of the length to measure.  I had kids that spread out the 8 glass slippers evenly from foot to head and called the length 8 {even though there were huge gaping holes in between each slipper!}

So half way into this project we stopped and worked on measuring a longer length together on the carpet.  We sat in a circle and worked through each person's incorrect strategies until finally--FINALLY someone said, "We could reuse the first slipper card at the end of the measuring and keep going!" Thank goodness for teamwork! Now I'm not promising that if we did this again, all of my kids would remember to iterate their standard units, but we certainly are one step closer.

Thankfully, I was able to save this failure of a lesson and get some good from it!  8 years later it happens a lot less, but it still happens a lot.  And each class is different.  Sometimes lessons bomb one year that went perfectly the year before!  Needless to say, the kids did not finish their Royal Measurements handout, but hopefully they gained much more from the lesson than if I'd just pushed through the failures to complete a silly recording sheet!

Modify and adjust, modify and adjust, modify and adjust...

This was a new activity I tried this year.  Would I do it again? Absolutely! But I've learned that I have a lot more to learn about how to teach kids measurement...it's not as cut and dry as I thought.  Luckily, I have a 3 day training at the end of the month on measurement with a leading researcher in measurement.  I will definitely be putting some more measurement activities in each of our Common Core units so that students will get more hands on practice.  We already practice non-standard measurement and ordering lengths weekly with our Math Wall, but I'm seeing that it's just not enough!

Have you ever had an ideal lesson that bombed in your room? I'd love to hear about it!!


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