Paper Bag Princess

This is one of my favorite books.  I like that the main character is a strong girl that doesn't give up.  She is smart and able to outsmart a dragon to save the prince.  I also love that she realizes at the end of the book that the prince isn't very nice.  It was a good opener to discuss how people should treat each other no matter what they look like.   In the story, the prince doesn't want to be rescued by the princess because she is dirty and wearing a bag.

by Rober Munsch

First, we took paper bags and cut out holes for the head and the arms.  I also ended up taping paper over the words cover up the writing on the bag. 

The girls then got to decorate their paper bag princess dresses.

Don't forget the crown!

The finished product

Once our dresses were finished, we acted out the story.  The girls had a fun time taking turns pretending to be all of the characters in the story.  I think they know this book by heart now!

Number identification and counting

These are east activities that can be done at any time.  I noticed at the the time that Sophia did not have a big grasp on number recognition and often skipped numbers when counting.  

Easy as can be to prepare.  I took a large sheet of paper and broke it up into 10 squares.  She loves to glue ANYTHING so this was a no-brainer.

She took googly eyes and glued the correct number of eyes to match the number.  This can be modified to be harder by using words instead of numbers in the boxes.

Next up, we took 10 plates and wrote a number on each plate.  I mixed them up and she had to first line them up in order from smallest to biggest.

She had to find objects to put on each plate.  The plate with the number 1 had one object....

Oreo needed to monitor her work.

This was great for her to practice counting.  At every plate, she had to count what she was placing down.

She enjoyed this but as we got to the higher numbers, she started to lose interest.  She claimed she couldn't find anything to put on the plates....We finished up to 10 and then I had the fun job of putting all the things back where they belonged. 

Finally blogging again.....Letter hide and seek

I have had pictures on my phone of various activities that we have done over the past year.  I have been a little busy having a third child and all:)  This is one of Sophia's favorite games to play.  It is a great way to reinforce letter recognition and have a little fun in the process. 

First, I wrote all the letters on sentence strips and cut them up.  I wrote both capital and lower case letters.

I wrote the match on the back side of the cards (lower case e had a capital E on the back).  This allows the activity to be self correcting.  Sophia could see if she found the correct card or not.

I would give her a capital letter card.  In this case, she needed to find the lower case b to make a match.

I hid the lower case letters all throughout the house. 

Once she found a match, she had to tell me what the letter was.  This was also a great time to teach and review all the letter sounds too. 

We did this over 6 months ago and Sophia still asks me to play!