The Letter O

Two weeks ago when I taught joy school, we learned about the letter O, the number 14, and the color orange.

The first day was ocean themed. We read My Octopus Arms, Ocean Babies, and Wow! Ocean!. (Checked out from the Provo Library -  as well as all the other books we read this week. I had Jared get a card because they never have the books I want at the Spanish Fork Library. Thanks Jared!)

We did an octopus pom pom magnet page (from this set). I do at least one of these every time I teach because I went to all the effort to make the pom pom magnets - I want them to get used! And they always seem to enjoy them.

We did some sorting with ocean beads. I already had the beads from making this quiet book page. I purchased them at JoAnn last summer. I had 4 sets of sorting that they took turns doing.

Counting with colors.

More counting.

Sorting by kind.

Sorting by color and stringing onto pipe cleaners.

Some took longer than others (the stringing in particular), so I had them do these puzzles (with magnets added to the backs) while they waited.

We had goldfish crackers and Nemo fruit snacks for our snack. (Easiest snack ever.)

We played Ocean Bingo with Swedish Fish. (You can print off custom bingo sheets here. Pretty cool.)

And finally we did an octopus craft.

I had the supplies all ready for this ocean window craft, but we ran out of time. I sent it home, so they could make them later. Corbyn loved making his during Peyton's nap. (I found the foam stickers at Dollar Tree. Much cheaper than the ones I saw at JoAnn for like $8 - even if I had used a coupon.)

The second day we did the number 14, the color orange, owls, Olympics, and outer space.  

We did a pom pom magnet picture of 14 snowflakes.

We had orange jello and orange juice for our snack. Corbyn was the only one who would eat the jello, so they ended up having goldfish crackers again.

I showed them how we make orange by mixing red and yellow and then we used oranges to stamp an O outline.

We read Owl Babies and did this owl letter match game.

We did this O is for Olympics craft.

We watched a bobsled race from the 2010 Olympics and then had our own bobsled race on a track made from wrapping paper rolls cut in half (idea here). 

We also tossed "snowballs" into the Olympic rings (idea here).

The Olympics would not be complete without medals! I just cut circles out of glitter gold foam and stapled them to some ribbon. 

Finally we read Out in Space and sifted rice to find the "planets" (idea here). 

I think it was a successful week of joy school!