N is for Nest, Night, Noodles, and Necklace

This past week, the kids and I learned about the letter N for preschool. It was a fun letter, and I learned that there are a lot of cool N activities out there. We didn't get to do everything I would have liked to do, but what we did do was great.

As I mentioned in my last post, we have been stuck inside and you can almost feel the pent up energy of my kids radiating throughout the house. I knew that worksheets, handwriting, etc. were not going to be an option this week. We needed something a little more fun and interactive.

We started out as usual, with a letter N craft, making N's with nests. Each of the kids did their N a little bit differently, but I thought they all turned out great. To go along with this activity we read the book In the Nest by Anna Millbourne. We talked about birds and the kinds of materials they build their nests out of. And of course, I wished for the zillionth time that it was spring so we could go on a nature walk and try to find bird nests. But since that isn't possible, this book is the next best thing.

More appropriate for the season, was our reading of Snowmen at Night by Caralyn Buchner. This is a really fun book that makes the kids laugh. We talked about nighttime, and what we do at night. Then we compared that with some of the funny things that snowmen do at night. The we made puffy paint snowmen. I made the puffy paint myself, it was super easy. One part Elmer's glue mixed with one part shaving cream. I only made a cereal bowl full, but it was WAY more than we needed to make four snowmen, so be aware of that if you decide to try our the recipe. It has a cool texture and was fun to paint with. We hung them up to dry over night and plan on adding some snowman accessories another day.

One morning we attempted to make structures out of spaghetti noodles and marshmallows, but the marshmallows I had in the cupboard were to old and stale, and the noodles kept snapping. I bought new marshmallows and left the kids to build with Grandma Swan while I ran to a doctor's appointment. They had a great time. Grandma taught them how to build and identify different shapes, triangles, rectangles, squares, parallelograms, etc. And they they built some really cool houses and other structures. I love Grandma School! :)

We also did some patterning with Cheerios while we made cereal necklaces. Adelia pretty much just ate her pile, but the boys really got into it. I used the multi-grain Cheerios so that there'd be some color variation for the patterning.