U Day: Under Umbrellas

U is a hard letter if you think about it. There aren't many good, simple nouns that start with U. So I had a bit of a difficult time this week and mostly stuck to the word 'under' and my main source of U.

Originally I thought I would make a U obstacle course, with a bunch of things in a row that they had to get under, like under a blanket, under a laundry basket...but that's about where my ideas stopped, and I never could come up with anything else for them to go under, so I gave up on that one. But because I thought we'd  be doing the obstacle course, we planned to have letter day outside. I was glad we did, because what we did end up doing made kind of a mess. :) But it was fun. 

First I read them a little lift the flap book that asked questions like, "Where is the penguin? Is he under the bath mat?" And then you lift the flap and find the penguin. It was a little bit below their level, but it got the point of under across I think. Then we talked about how fish live under the water, and we painted an underwater scene.

For the first layer of the underwater scene we painted dark blue ocean. After that dried, I asked the boys if they'd ever been fishing and what you use to fish. They came up with a fishing pole. I asked them what part of the fishing pole goes under the water, and with a little help they came up with the hook. Then we cut out U's out of green paper and glued those to the paper to be our fishing hooks. Then the boys stuck sea creature stickers all over in their water. Lincoln put all of his in one big "school" instead of spreading them throughout the water, haha. It is always interesting to me the way kids choose to do things.

After that, I had the boys try an idea I saw online that looked really cool. You take a piece of bubble wrap and paint the bubbles a light blue, then you press it onto the top of your completed underwater scene. On the site I was looking on online, this gave the picture a cool bubbly underwater effect that didn't distract from the picture. But ours didn't quite turn out that way. I don't know if we pressed the bubble wrap too hard or what, but all it succeeded in doing was blurring our pictures. We ended up having to trace around the outside of the U hooks with a black magic marker so you could see it. But it was still fun.

For another activity we did an umbrella matching game. We talked about how you get under an umbrella when it rains so you don't get wet. I made the matching game using Word and did a search in Clip Art for umbrella, and picked six or so that I liked and pasted them twice into a word document and printed them out on cardstock and then cut them up so there were two of each. Then we spread all the umbrellas out on the table and the boys got to pick which ones matched and put them together in a pile. They both did really well with this activity, so I think we'll be doing some similar ones in the future.

Lincoln was funny, when I spread them out on the table for him I just put them randomly in a big circularish pattern...but then before he started matching them together, he rearranged them into a straight line. I just like watching how his brain works, it's fascinating to me. And it's not even that one way is better than the other, just that he seems to process things differently than I do.

For our last activity, I filled two empty ice cream buckets with water and gave one to each boy. Then we had pile of different things, a rock, a penny, a marble, a feather, a pine cone,a filled water balloon, a ping pong ball, a toy car, a sponge, an empty spool of thread, etc. and one at a time we put each thing in the water and guessed whether it would go under the water or stay on top. I think this was the boys favorite, and they seemed to really enjoy making the predictions about what each object would do. Sometimes they guessed right, and sometimes they were way off. But they were always anxious for the next thing.

And for the snack I did dirt cups (chocolate pudding with crushed Oreos on top) and told the boys they had to dig under the dirt and they would find a surprise. What was the surprise?

A gummy worm of course! :)