Happy Birthday Ava & Frog Jump Masks

Today we celebrated one of our dear classmate's birthdays! Happy Birthday Ava! 

Today while working on handwriting we talked about Frog Jump Letters (letters that require us to pick up our pencils and jump to finish a letter). To compliment our Frog Jump Letters and our Brazil study, we made our own Frog masks.

Rain Sticks

To continue our theme of the Amazon Rain Forest and Brazil, today we made rain sticks! We used recycled bottles, toothpicks, rice, and duct tape to create our calming noise makers. We used this opportunity to count, compare values, talk about measurements, compare measurements, build fine motor control, and direction following.

First we counted and placed our toothpicks in the bottles. We used on pincer fingers to continue to build strength.

Dancing Turtles

 We continued our adventure through Brazil today by reading the book The Dancing Turtle by Pleasant DeSpain. A Brazilian Folktale that tells the tale of a flute playing and dancing turtle who tries to escape his captors.

After reading we made our own dancing turtles. The book and activity was great for making prediction, connecting texts to illustration, making inferences,   reinforcing color recognition, color mixing, fine motor control, sequencing, and following directions.

To make our turtles we painted two sides of our shells.

Then we used paper to twist our arms and legs, as well as the turtle's tail.

We added a balloon for the head...

We staples them all together (with help from Mrs. Burns and Miss Sarah).

They turned our great but we thought they were missing something...

...like a bow...

 ...and a top hat! Our Dancing Turtles are complete!