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Compassion

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Now I Know My ABCs ~ Ff is for Feathers

 
feathersforlunch

Summary: A pet cat tries to get lunch but all he catches is feathers. This is a cute story plus nature-guide rolled up in one book. Lois Ehlert depicts 12 common birds in the story along with some fun facts at the end of the book.

ABC Letter Box
letterFobjects  letterFsort  

For our Letter Ff week, I hid our letter Ff objects in a small tub of feathers! The girls had so much fun flinging feathers everywhere!

ABC Letter Learning Activities
Ffhandwriting 
For each letter I’ve created a handwriting/poem sheet. We read the poem together, highlight the letter F’s in the poem, and then finger-trace how to make the letters. Then we trace the letters with either a crayon or pencil. Many times my 2yr. old can only handle doing the finger-tracing. That’s great! I don’t pressure her to do the writing. My 4yr. old, on the other hand, is very interested in writing her letters.

ABC Crafts


birdcraft5   
After seeing if we could find any of the birds mentioned in the book, we decided to make our own feathered-friend craft.
 
ABC Theme Activities 
feathercolorsort 
Have you noticed that I use craft foam a lot? It is such a versatile product to have on-hand. We used the craft foam as sorting mats for our colored feathers.

feathers_fursort 
For this sorting activity, we sorted pictures into two groups: animals that have feathers, and animals that have fur. I used a piece of craft foam for one mat and faux fur for the second mat. The picture cards were originally purchased to be writing prompts for my older children, but I think I’ve used them more with my preschoolers. I love having sturdy photos around to go with our studies.

feathersforlunchgame 
I pulled out the cat can from our letter Cc week (you can find the download under Letter Cc) and came up with a “Feathers for Lunch” game. My daughter would roll the die and then feed the cat that amount of feathers.

feathersnaturetray 
I pulled together various items to make a nature tray. We used the eggs we painted during our Letter E week, added some feathers, fake birds, and a magnifying glass.

observefeathers observefeathers2

We talked about how the different feathers felt, what colors they had, what they might be used for, and then we tried to guess what bird the feathers came from.

ABC Pretend Play and Games

feathersnaturetray2
The girls played and played with those birds!

Other ABC Resources:
ABC Printables from Homeschool Creations
Letter of the Week Curriculum from COAH
ABC Flashcards and More from 1+1+1=1
ABC Letter Crafts
Songs for Saplings ABC Verses

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5 comments:

Evelyn Wenzel said...

The handwriting/poem sheet doesn't link up to a printable...

Jolanthe said...

If you scroll down a bit on the page that it links to, you will see the
link to the printable under the letter F along with a link to the
planning page and rest of the letters we've been talking about. :) It
does not link directly to the file itself.

Deb Chitwood said...

Great activities, Maureen ...and I love your bird-theme nature tray! I featured your post and nature tray photo in my Montessori-Inspired Bird Unit at http://livingmontessorinow.com/2012/03/27/montessori-inspired-bird-unit/

jane said...

i can't get to the craft blog... not found... is it just me?

Jolanthe said...

I'm able to get the lowercase crafts here: http://totallytots.homestead.com/NowIKnowMyABCslowercase.html

And the uppercase crafts here: http://totallytots.homestead.com/NowIKnowMyABCs.html