D is for Duck

In my original plans for the year, I had us doing D is for dinosaur. But when it came down to it, I decided that we do a lot with dinosaurs all the time. And I shook things up, and did D is for duck. The book we used was The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack. It's an oldie, but a goodie.

As usual, our first activity was our duck letter craft. I liked this one, because we also got to talk a little bit about shapes, since the feet are made of stars and the beak is a heart.

On the second day we did a finger play to a different book called Five Little Ducks. I found the cutest home made finger puppets on Pinterest and made them, using the fingers of yellow cleaning gloves for the bodies and gluing wiggly eyes on them and pieces of craft foam for the beaks. The kids LOVED the puppets, and I ended up making several sets so we could all recite the story at the same time.

Our third activity was a hand print art craft. Basically, you cut a round head and body out of construction paper (if we ever do this again, I'll make them a little bigger than I did this time), and glue it to another piece of paper. Then you use orange hand prints for the feet, and yellow hand prints for the wings. We had some extra wiggly eyes and used those, but you could also draw them in. We used construction paper for the beaks. And drew reeds and a pond in the background with crayons. They turned out super cute. I love hand print art!

On the fourth day, I did something I've never done before...I made a sensory bin. Usually I think sensory bins are more work than they're worth, but this one didn't seem too hard, and turned out to be the favorite activity of the week. We have 26 alphabet ducks, each has a different letter on it and is dressed up like something that starts with that letter, for example the A duck is dressed like an astronaut. I put those into a plastic bin full of water. Then for texture, I added some Orbeez. Orbeez are cool. They start out as tiny little beads, and as they sit in the water they absorb it, and grow to 200 times their size, to about the size of a marble. Then you can play with them and bounce them like bouncy balls. It's fun. While we waited for our Orbeez to grow, we played a little math game. I wrote a number 0-10 on the bottom of each duck. Ivan had to pull out two ducks and tell me which number was bigger. Lincoln had to pull out two ducks and add the numbers together.

For our last activity we made duck shaped sugar cookies and decorated them. We took some to the neighbors, who, I'm sure, thought it was strange to be receiving cookies shaped like ducks, but oh well.

We were going to try and squeeze in a trip to a real duck pond to feed some ducks, but we had a couple of other, unrelated field trips and activities this week, and it just didn't happen. Next time. Linked up with: