Alphabet Soup Letter "B"

It has been a while since I've blogged. So I'm putting in a double post for the start of the year. I started out the month as I always do with our Early Literacy Series, Alphabet Soup. Last week's featured letter was "B".

I was getting a little nervous because I had requested one of the books I needed for the program from another branch weeks ago. It came in right on the wire, the morning of the program.

We started out with Baking Day at Grandma's by Anika Denise. It set an appropriate tone with it's wintery theme and repeating B words. It also has a great recipe for chocolate cake in the back that kids can bake with their parents. I used this as my take home activity for the back of my handout.

Then we jumped into an the action rhyme "Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear." This kept the bear theme going but also gave us a chance to get up and move around.

Next was Miss Brooks Loves Books (and I don't) by Barbara Bottner. Library and bibliophile themes galore. Reluctant reader finds a book to love. I was sold. I worried that it might be a bit too long. But when we started to talk about warts and snorting, the kids were sold too. I'm planning on putting the sequel, Miss Brooks' Story Nook in next month's letter "S" program.

Then it was time for our letter sound identification activity. This time, I introduced the "Mystery Bag."  I filled a paper sack with objects. Some of them started with the featured letter. Some did not. I asked the kids to put their hand in the bag and pull out an object, then drop them into a basket. One basket was labeled with the letter "B", the other one was labeled "Non-Letter B".

They had a lot of fun closing their eyes and reaching in to feel around for the objects. Again, I think this may be a keeper of an activity. It was a lot easier to set up than the fish pond for "F" or the Sorting Hat for "H".

We finished up with a Venezuelan version of The Wheels on the Bus by By Melanie Williamson
and the Amador Family. The craft was Letter "B" Bear Bag puppets.

There was also a Winter Storm Alert in our area, and the windchill was dipping us into sub-zero temperatures. So preschool attendance was pretty low. But I was grateful that we had limited attendance for this, as the kids could take their time with the many small pieces, and there were lots of laughs with parents.

Frozen Science

Last week was cool, but holy crap you guys, this week I did my FIRST STEAM PROGRAM EVER!

Our Frozen Science program took a heck of a lot to setup and reset between my back-to-back morning programs. But it was totally awesome!

We started out with a Disney picture book adaptation of Frozen by Victoria Saxon. Again, I was worried it might be a little long. But apparently everyone in the room had seen the movie, so the kids were adding in parts of the story that were pared down in the book.

Then it was time for our first ice experiments. We discussed how ice is made by freezing water, how it occurs naturally in winter. I had a bowl of ice cubes ready and a bowl of water. I asked the kids if they thought ice would sink to the bottom or float on top of the water. Then each child got to drop an ice cube in to see if it would sink or float.

We talked about how in science, we use our eyes to observe things. I did another demonstration on melting salt where I set out ice cubes in three bowls and sprinkled cold water, hot water, and colored salt over some ice cubes. I asked them all which one they thought would melt fastest.

We let the cubes set and moved on to our action story, "The Snow Queen with the Cold Cold Heart" from Naomi Baltuck's Crazy Gibberish. This is a great resource for Action songs. There were specific actions associated with each character, that the kids would act out each time i said the character's name. This gave us just enough time to see what happened with our ice cube experiment afterwards. (Spoilers: the ice melts best with salt.)

I switched things up and got the kids and parents started on a simple fold-and-cut snowflake craft. This bought me time to set up the next ice activity, that I dubbed "Queen Elsa's Cold Cold hands." It was modeled after a wonderful activity from the Happy Hooligans Blog.

This is where setup got a bit crazy. I had three frozen hands containing beads, sequins, and glitter for each class. 

To melt the hands: I had multiple bowls of different colored salt, red tinged warm water (not too warm) and blue tinged cold water (not too cold). I used food color and kosher salt so everything was non toxic. I even made sure to get vinyl gloves for creating the frozen hands in case of latex allergies.

The kids had fun pouring the salt over the hands with spoons and dropping water over them with pippettes. I had two sets of each of the supplies and the larger groups had to share a lot more than the smaller groups. But the parents helped, and everyone had a good time. 

                               

One little girl even asked. "Are we doing science?" to which I replied an emphatic. "Yes you are!" 

Overall, two excellent programs to start the new year. And now just comes the clean up. Joy!