Name alien!

I found this great idea on another blog today by Allison McDonald. So simple, but a great idea.

First provide your child with a piece of paper (any colour goes), then ask them to fold in half long ways. This on its own is easier for some children than others.

Next, ask your child to write their name across the width of the paper. Try & encourage writing down to the fold. That way, the resulting alien

shape will be more fun to work with. Big letters are a lot of fun and actually quite challenging when kids have started to write small for school purposes.

When the name is written, draw a line roughly around each

letter so that your child has a guide to follow when they are cutting. Then off they go with the scissors. It really does not matter how neat the cutting is.

Next stage is to open out the paper & turn it over to the blank side....this is where the creating comes in. Supply your child with whatever you think they would like to embellish their alien with! Googly eyes, paints, glitter, feather, pipe cleaners, stickers...whatever works.

Henry had fun with this and requested 6 eyes for his alien...then added some hands, feet and general glittering!

Henry does Hens!

At Christmas we became the proud owners of two brown hens - Henry took delivery of them on Xmas day from Santa! Named Henrietta and Peck Peck, they have become integral members of our family! As I write this blog however, I am recovering from finding one of said hens in the middle of the road near our house after she decided a re enactment of "chicken run" would be fun! Luckily I found her, caught her & delivered her back safely!

With a number of snow days in the last couple of weeks, I dedicated one day to lots

of activities with a "

hen" theme. I'll try & outline them all here, but in summary we had:

1. Create a piece of hen related art (painting, collage, drawing etc)
2. Words rhyming with "egg" and "hen" - thought of and written down by Henry.
3. Read some hen related stories (see another post).
4. Sight words bingo (with an egg theme)
5. Simple addition of how many eggs have the two hens layed!
6. Provide an egg shape and suggest that it be turned into a person/animal etc.
7. Create a story about Henry and his hens in simple words and read it.

I apologise for the long post, but we did quite a few activities!

1. Hen art

Henry's piece of hen art was a collage using tissue paper cut up and scrunched up. I drew the outline of the Hen, and provided the

squares of cut tissue paper. I did originally offer this in gold, orange and yellow, thinking Henry would use all colours for a multi coloured hen.....however he

stuck with gold and I cut adequate bits for him to finish in that colour. Peck Peck the collage hen was a great success!

2. Rhyming words

On the internet you can find images of

anything you want. A search for "eggs" brought me a great egg picture which I replicated loads of

times. For the rhyming words, Henry had the egg shapes to write each letter on to create the rhyming words.

3. Hen & egg stories

We have on our shelf - Coriander the contrary hen and The most wonderful egg in the world, which we read. We also did an activity with the latter title which I will post as a separate activity.

4. Simple words egg bingo

For Egg bingo I printed a page with 8 eggs on, and onto each of these eggs I wrote one of Henry's sight words. I then printed out a further 8 eggs that I cut out and wrote the same words on. I replicated each of these so I could play with Henry. We took it in turns to take eggs off the pile and read the words then cover the eggs. It was a bit more fun that simple squares with words in.

5.Egg addition eggsercise!

I found a picture of a hen on the internet & printed it out twice. I then printed about 10 eggs out. Under each hen I placed a number of eggs and we did simple addition with Henry recording the number of eggs layed next to a picture of his hen run.

6. Egg head

I provided Henry with a blank piece of paper and a cut out of an egg, and suggested he turn it into a face. I imagined he would add some hair, eyes, nose and mouth......I was wrong - he actually turned it into an egg person! Then when asked to name it...called it Henry Egg!

7. A story about Henry and his hens

This I prepared in advance. I created simple sentences that Henry knew the words or could sound out the words with some help. I then added a few images to help with the story recognition. Henry thought this was great, that he appeared in the story with his hens!

Name that sign!

This little project was a bit of fun, though it made me realise how much Henry actually knew about signs!

First I used by creativity to draw a few signs, and Henry identified each....amazingly he knew them all (not helped by my artistic skills)!

Then I asked Henry to draw me a sign warning about anything he wanted.....he came up with a tree across the road, which he drew and labelled for me.

I then suggested he did another. Very into his hens and the moment, he created a sign to warn that one of his hens was about - I might just have to stick that one to the back door to remind me!

This occupied us for about 15 minutes, but got him involved in being creative and imaginative, writing, sounding his letters and discussion.