Deirdre, Author at JDaniel4s Mom

Deirdre Smith writes/owns JDaniel4’s Mom. After twenty years as a elementary school and technology resource teacher in Northern Virginia, she became a stay at home mom in upstate South Carolina. Her blog features ways she and her 5 year old are exploring learning, crafting, creating healthy meals and living life to its fullest. Deirdre can also be found on twitter as @jdaniel4smom and on her blog's FB page. You can also check her out on Google+.

How to Make Halloween Treat Bags

October 16, 2013 By Deirdre

Sponsored by Global Influence With Products Supplied by Hershey’s

I have been going to my son’s class to share a book and the do an activity with them once a month. I was planning on sharing to book T.Rex Trick or Treats this month. When I was contacted about sharing Hershey’s and their Celebrate with Hershey’s campaign with you, I thought I could do an activity with his class that featured Hershey’s chocolate in Halloween treat bags. Dinosaurs, trick or treating, kindergartners, and chocolate just seem to go together.

How to Make Halloween Treat Bags

Creating the treat bags to hold the treats was so much fun. I hopped onto PicMonkey and created a label that I could print out on blank index cards. It was a blast to work on the labels layout. I probably spent more time than I needed to working on its design. JDaniel was at school and I lingered for the fonts for while.

When he came home, I had him punch a hole in the left-hand corner of each index cards. He was in hole punch heaven. I think using a hole punch is something most kids like to do too. We folded down the top of each paper bag and he punched two holes in the folded down area.

The bags and hole punch were then set aside and the fun began. We focused on putting the candy without peanuts into the bags. (I wasn’t sure if everyone was allowed to have peanuts.) That left us with five out of the six Hershey’s candies to put in the bags. The goal was to put one or two of each of the candies into each bag.

When finished distributing the candy into the bags, we folded the flaps of the bags down and lined up the holes we had punched. With the holes lined up, we both worked on placing orange ribbons through the holes. Then we placed a card onto one end of the ribbon. Finally, I tied a bow with the ribbon. We both thought the bags looked great.

What activity do I plan to do?

The children having been talking about shapes lately in math. I decided to create a shape activity for them to do using the Hershey’s candy. Each child would be given a bag of candy treats.

The children will be asked to trace the outline of all the candy in the bag with a crayon. They can trace the shapes onto a piece of white paper. The outlines can be placed anywhere on the paper they would like to place them. I am going to call this creating a shape map.

Then the kids will be given a half sheet of paper to record the number of each shape they had in their bags. Each bag will not have the same amount of everything. So each child will have to record what is in their own bag and not look at what their neighbors have done. The kids can count the actual candy or the shapes they have traced on the paper.

By the end of the activity, they will have a shape map, a recording sheet, and a bag of treats to take home. I hope they will enjoy it. I have had fun putting it together.

Wait! What about the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups?

They are not going to waste. No, they will go with the remaining candy into some treat bags I am putting together for some of the teachers at my son’s school. I am hoping to start substitute teaching at his school this fall. Putting together treat bags that contain candy and a magnetic business card with ways to contact me seemed like a good way to get their attention.

Disclaimer: I was sent the candy for this post by Global Influence with products provided by Hershey’s. All the activity thoughts are my own.

Counting Hands- Math Activity

October 14, 2013 By Deirdre

$Counting Hands- Math Activity$

When you are learning to count on or as we called it when I was little adding, it is helpful to have hands on math tool to work with. Counting hands make a math activity fun and are really fun to make. They also look a little Halloween like which is great for this time of year.

Materials:

plastic gloves
1 bag of mixed beans
rubber bands
Measuring spoon (Tablespoon size)

Directions for Making Counting Hands:

$Counting Hands- Math Activity$

Use a tablespoon sized measuring spoon to scoop the beans into the gloves. You may need someone to hold open the gloves for you so the beans won’t spill all over the table.
Lay the gloves filled with beans on the table and make sure that the gloves will lay flat. You don’t want to overfill them.
Hold the wrist end of the gloves closed and loop a rubber band around it. Don’t wrap the rubber band to tightly just yet.
$Counting Hands- Math Activity$
You will need to test out the fingers to make sure that they will be able to be folded backwards when you are trying to count. You don’t want them to be too floppy or too rigid. When you have them just as you want them, make sure the rubber bands are looped tightly.

Let’s Explore Addition

Now that you have the counting hands made you can work on adding with them. We put our hands on a black work mat and took out some dice with dots. (Dots are easier for children to add with then dice with numbers, but dice with numbers will help children visualize math facts as they will see them in their math books.)

$Counting Hands- Math Activity$

JDaniel is just learning to add at school. We have used math tools with plus and equal signs, but for this activity we didn’t use them. We just rolled the dice. Then we bent down the correct number of fingers and added up the bent fingers on each hand.

Additional Ways to Use the Counting Hands

If you like the idea of a plus sign and equal sign, you could use the hands on a white board or chalkboard. You could just draw them on the black work mat if you wanted to with white crayon or chalk. Adding the symbols will help kids see this math activity as more like a real math equations.
These hands could easily be used for working on subtracting or the nines table in multiplication.
You could place plastic rings on the odd or even number fingers of the hands.
Another math activity you can do with the counting hands is count by twos. Children can easily push the fingers together into pairs and count by twos.

If you like this math activity, here are some more you might like:

Roll and Cover Ocean Animal Mats

Free Printable Interactive Math Mats

Measuring Chalk Drawings

What other math activities can you think of to do with the counting hands?

Disclaimer: We used gloves that are rather thin. You may want to put one pair of gloves into another to make them thicker. It will make the beans harder to see, but may keep the beans in the gloves.

Corn Maze- Math Activity

October 13, 2013 By Deirdre

$Corn Maze Numbers Math Activity$

We will be walking through a full-size corn maze when we go to the pumpkin patch until then we have small corn maze math activity in our backyard. It doesn’t have any dead ends or twists to it. It is a simple avenue of corn that we can walk through.

Our corn maze is simply construction paper husks of corn placed on stakes. (The stakes have been collected over time. Our lawn care company places them in our front yard along with a placard with their company name on them. We keep the stakes and pitch the placards.)

I placed a wide variety of numbers on the corn cobs. JDaniel is working on the numbers 1-100 at school this year. I picked numbers that are all over that range.

$Corn Maze Numbers Math Activity - Walking Through the Maze -Gathering Numbers$

The first time through the corn lane JDaniel had to simply read the number to me. If he could read me the number, then he could pick the corn husk and put it into his blue harvest basket. Some numbers gave him some trouble, but most were not difficult.

We then planted the corn husks back onto the stakes. I should have laminated them. The construction paper started to crease a little when we put the corn back on the stakes.

As we walked through the corn this time I asked JDaniel to tell me the numbers that came before and after each number on the corn. This took a little longer and required a little thought. Simply recalling the number had been much easier. This required visualizing the number and then the numbers that appear around it. Moving up to a new level in the higher levels of thinking was a good brain stretcher for him

The last time through the numbers I had JDaniel tell the number in the ones and ten places in each number. I think understanding what makes a number a number helps children bring meaning to the number. This wasn’t that difficult for him. I didn’t think it would be. The goal of was to help him start to build up the number sense compartment of his brain.When he learns expanded notation in school, knowing how many tens and ones a number has will be helpful.

After we explored the corn maze math activity a little more, we took it down and put in it the garage. I was pleasantly surprised that JDaniel asked if we could put it up again a few days later. This time he helped me set up the corn maze math activity and picked what math activities we would do. He got to be the teacher and I was the corn harvester. I just love having him teach me new things.Have you ever been through a corn maze?

Kids Gardening – Planting a Pumpkin’s Seeds in a Pumpkin

October 11, 2013 By Deirdre

Planting pumpkin seeds in a pumpkin is our latest attempt to grow pumpkins. Last summer we tried several times to grow pumpkins in our backyard. The seeds grew into long vines with beautiful blooms. The blooms were then eaten by big beetles that apparently love pumpkin flowers and live under the shed we planted our pumpkin seeds beside. This fall I decided we would try to grow them one more time with seeds fresh from a pumpkin.
Why?JDaniel and I recently read a book called Pumpkin Hill and that same afternoon I came across a post from Growing PreK called The Pumpkin Project. We didn’t think that this was a coincidence. It was like we were having a kids gardening project put in front of us that we really needed to do.

Kids Gardening Project with Pumpkin Seeds

Preparing the Pumpkin
I love the idea of growing a pumpkin in a pumpkin. Growing in PreK cleared the pumpkin seeds out of the pumpkin and left the guts and everything else inside. We cleared everything out of the pumpkin using our hands at first. We clawed and pulled the guts and seeds out. Our hands were soon covered in slippery and slimy substances. Then we used ice teaspoons to scrape along the inside of the pumpkin to separate the remainder of the pumpkin’s guts from its interior wall.

Most planters and pots have holes in the bottom of them for drainage. We pushed a screwdriver into the bottom of the pumpkin to give it some areas for drainage too. That and one of us might over water the seeds and I didn’t want them to drown.

When we had completely cleaned out the pumpkin, we headed to the kitchen sink to rinse off the seeds. I am not sure that we needed to clean them off, but I thought it was the right thing to do for this kids gardening project.

Planting in the Pumpkin

With the seeds clean we headed back outside to fill the pumpkin with potting soil. We couldn’t decide how deep into the soil the seeds needed to be. What we decided to do was to add soil then seeds, add soil then seeds, and add soil then seeds. The hope is that we have some seeds at the right depth.

Finally, JDaniel watered the soil to give the seeds a moist area to grow in. We must have put in too much water. Just beneath the pumpkin on a rubber mat, we placed the planted pumpkin on a pool of water appeared. I was so glad we had put drainage holes into the pumpkin for this kids gardening project.

Exploring a Book

The link to Pumpkin Hill below is an affiliate link.

Pumpkin Hillby Elizabeth Spurr is the wonderful story about how a lonely pumpkin became a whole patch of pumpkins. The lonely pumpkin grew alone on a hill. One day it broke from its vine and rolled down a hill and into a field. When it finally came to a stop, it broke open and scattered its seeds all over a field.

The owners of the field couldn’t decide what to grow in the field that falls and so it was left unplanted. As time went on pumpkins grew in the field. No one knew they were there and so no one came to get them. The pumpkins withered and died leaving their seeds in the soil. Once again the farmer plowed the field and left it without seeds. He just couldn’t decide what to plant.

This time a wind blew the pumpkins out of the field and into town. There were pumpkins everywhere. What happened next? Well, you will have to read the story to see what happens to all of them. Let’s just say that were just like they grandfather pumpkin.

In our case, our pumpkin and its seeds are sitting on our front step. I am hoping that we will have little sprouts by Halloween. The weather here in South Carolina has stayed warm and sunny. If it stays warm, planting a pumpkin this late in the year may still work out for us. Hooray! This kids gardening project has been a success.

Here are some more fun kids gardening activities:

Plastic Egg Greenhouse

Paper Plate Greenhouse

I have decided to ask you to link your posts to the Read.Explore.Learn. Facebook page instead of running a link up. I hope you will stop by and share your children’s book related activities there.

Mama, Do You Love Me?

October 9, 2013 By Deirdre

My family wasn’t big on saying the words “I Love You” out loud. They wrote it in cards at birthdays, but beyond that I don’t remember hearing it. ( I could be forgetting other instances though.) I tell JDaniel that I love him all the time because of that and well because I love him a whole lot.

When the two of us were together most of the day, I would say it all during the day. He must have loved hearing it, because he has started asking me if I love him when he gets up in the morning, when I pick him up from school, and when I tuck him in a night. It is like he has a deficit in his heart my telling him that I love him.

Starting school has been a transition for us. JDaniel being in school all day has been new for him. It means a longer time of following school rules. There are 27 children in his class and that means there are twenty six other children who need attention from the kindergarten teacher and aide. It means there isn’t someone reminding him that he is special and loved as often.

I am sure the teachers and aides at his school love the students, but it is a different kind of love than he has enjoyed being given to him when he was at home.

There aren’t the constant reminders of being loved. There weren’t constant reminders at home all the time though. We did and still do lock horns. He is expected to follow family rules and when he doesn’t follow them I am sure he doesn’t feel that I love him. JDaniel has shared that very thing with us from his “timeout” spot.

Still right at this moment he need more reassurances that I love him. In many ways he reminds me of a squirrel storing up nuts for the winter. It is like he is stockpiling reminders that I love him to carry with him to school. It feel like he should have had a number of I love yous stored from his younger years, (I know I said it often.) but he doesn’t seem to have enough.

There have been so many changes this fall. Kindergarten full day was a huge change, but there have been others. Knowing his dad and I are both job hunting has made him nervous about the future. We have tried to upbeat and remind him that God will give us the jobs He wants us to have. Having less time to play and do things together do to fuller days is something he has complained about.

So, I am snuggling with JDaniel in the morning and whispering into his ear, ” I love you.” I am placing notes in his lunch telling him that I love him. I am creating I love you lunches. Finally I am hugging him a little longer at bedtime and saying, ” I love you! I love you! I love you!”

We all can have times when the I Love You sections of our hearts need filling so, when JDaniel asks,” Mama, do you love me?” I will answer him back with words of love. He loves to hear them and I so love to say them.

This post is linked to Things I Can’t Say and Mrs. Matlock.

Sight Word Game – Apple Tree Words

October 8, 2013 By Deirdre

When JDaniel came home from school last week, he found an Apple Tree Words sight word game hanging from a tree beside our driveway. “What is that? ” he asked me. “It is a fun way to work on sight or popcorn words,” I told him.
He gave me a look like more sight words. Yes, we have been working on sight words a lot this fall. JDaniel is learning some of them at school and we have been working on some at home. We have worked with them several different ways. There has been sight word snacks and sight word eye charts to name a few. Apple Tree Words gave him a chance to play a game that required him to get up and move.

Sight Word Game – Apple Tree Words

Create
I found some apple cutouts in my fall folder of ideas. ( I love when I find treasures like that.) On each of the apples, I placed a sight word. The apples were then mounted onto a blank index card. The cards had holes punched into them and ribbon placed through the hole.

When the cards are completed, I hung them up on a tree with low hanging branches.

Play

JDaniel was given a plastic basket to collect the apples from the tree. Each apple could not be picked until the word on the apple had been read. If I had to help me sound out the word, the apple had a remain hanging until he had read one other apple word correctly.

JDaniel’s favorites are the one and two letter words. He went for those first.Word after word came down from the tree. There were only a few words that gave him any trouble. He actually ended up having to capture each word between his fingers and reading it.

After the Activity Idea
The one thing that I didn’t plan for in this sight word game was that JDaniel might try to pull the apple tree words down instead of trying to slip the ribbons off the branches. Thankfully the tree we used for the apple tree word sight word game has flexible limbs. When he pulled the words down the limp bowed down and let the word’s ribbon slip right off.Have you picked apples this year?

Fire Ladder Learning Activities

October 6, 2013 By Deirdre

Today begins Fire Safety Week! To celebrate Fire Safety Week along with Fire Prevention Month I placed a fire truck ladder made of tape down a hall on the first floor of the house. When my husband asked what we were going to do with the ladder, I told him that JDaniel and I would brainstorm ways to use it.I hadn’t really thought about how we would use it initially. It was just time to take up the hallway numbers that had been going down the hallway for a couple of months. It did know that between JDaniel and I we would come up with a wide range of ideas.

Pretend Play

The first idea we came up with was to pretend to climb up the ladder. It looks easier than it is. You have to get down on all fours. Then you reach for the next rung and climb and reach and climb. Young knees may not feel the challenge of moving along a wood floor. Old mom knees felt the challenge!It was fun to pretend to be a fireman climbing the ladder. Climbing horizontally instead of vertically was new and unique.

Number Recognition

Calling out the numbers on a flashcards one at a time in order to move up a rung of the ladder was a simple way to review numbers. Early learners may want to work on the numbers 0-20. Older learners might want to work on larger two or maybe even three digit numbers. We worked on a variety of numbers.

Counting On

Agreeing on a number you want to start counting with on the bottom rung and then counting on until you reach the top of ladder is a second way we worked on number recognition.Some children like to start counting by counting from 1 on up to the number they need to start with. This is one of those learning activities that can help them wrap their brains around starting at the agreed number and going on. It helped us build a foundation for counting on.

Math Facts

Reviewing addition facts by starting on the bottom rung with first addend and then stepping up one rung at a time while adding the second addend is a lot of fun.Hint: You may find that you need to make more rungs or a longer ladder if you are working beyond early addition facts. We had fun adding movement to simple addition facts.

If you want to work on subtraction facts, you could move down the ladder instead of up or by taking steps backwards.

Sight Words

Just as you moved forward a rung by recognizing numbers, you could move up the ladder one rung at a time as you read sight words. Reviewing sight words is not always exciting. Putting on a fire hat and firemen’s raincoat and climbing rungs of a tape ladder can make reviewing them more fun.

Conclusion

The idea of doing fire ladder learning activities is to get children moving while learning. Some children enjoy getting up out of their seats to learn often. Others may be able to sit for longer periods of time, but need some variety of leaning activities offered to them. Either way fire ladder learning activities are fun and allow children to learn in a new way.

Fire Truck Craft

October 6, 2013 By Deirdre

One of the fun things I have been doing to help JDaniel’s class this year has been to help with the SEEDS program. It is right up my alley. The program is like Read.Explore.Learn. and you know how much I love to explore books.

I decided to share a fire truck theme book with them called Meeow and the Big Box is about a kitten who uses a big box to create a fire truck for pretend play. We first heard this book shared at a library storytime focused on fire safety. The librarian created a visual using a box that walked us through each of Meeow’s steps. The children just loved this book.

Creating the Fire Truck Craft

I only get about half an hour to read the book and do the craft. To save time I try to have everything cut out and ready to glue down. I even do a trial run on my own or with JDaniel to time it. He loves getting to be a guinea pig for his class.

Here is how the trial for this craft turned out:

First, we put the body of the fire truck on black paper. Then JDaniel added the windows and white bumper area. I think I could have cut a long strip for the bumper. It didn’t stick out very far in the front or back of the fire truck. I may need to make these a little longer for the class.

The windows for the fire truck were moved around a lot. JDaniel had ideas about where they needed to go and not go a couple of times. They really could go anywhere on the front of a fire truck and could be turned vertically or horizontally. I think not having a specific place for the windows gives the children can invite to make their trucks unique.

After working on the windows, JDaniel worked on adding the yellow accessories to the truck. The ladder could have gone anywhere on the truck or even on the roof of the truck. Both of the lights could have gone on the top or on the front. The trial run ended up with one of the top and one on the bottom.

The last thing to go on the fire truck craft was the wheels. I am not sure that fire trucks have brown wheels, but black wheels would have blended into the black background so, I went with brown.

I think it will be fun to do this craft with JDaniel’s class. We had fun working on it together. It would also be great to create with your children during National Fire Safety Month in October. They would probably like to read Meeow and the Big Box and make a fire truck too.

Read.Explore.Learn. – Fire Safety Themed Activites

October 4, 2013 By Deirdre

October is Fire Prevention Month. JDaniel loved to climb all over a fire truck when it came the library for Fire Prevention Month. Now that he is in school all day we can’t head over for story time and the fire truck’s visit. I decided to share with you and him fire themed learning activities and book designed to help children learn about fire safety.

This post contains affiliate links

Most children love fire trucks, dalmatian dogs, and well everything that is fire safety related except maybe fire alarms. Sparky the Fire Dog is a book filled with cute and informative pictures about a dog how he keeps safe.This books opens great discussions about fire safety and what children need to do encase of a fire. It is written in such a way that it doesn’t scare kids or place ideas in their heads about fire that they don’t need there.

Fire Safety Themed Activities to do After Reading the Book

Fire Roll and Count 1-20

Fire Safety Themed Activities - Roll and Cover Fire Truck

One of the areas JDaniel is working on at school is number recognition. He can count almost to 100 without skipping numbers, but recognizing numbers can be a challenge. I decided to focus this number recognition game of the numbers 1-20. He is actually good at recognizing most of the numbers in that range. I thought introducing a new number game would be easier with number he knew most of the numbers. I can always go back and put in more challenging numbers on the board later.

Fire Truck Roll and Cover 1-20

The game is really easy to play. You simply roll the three die and then you count the dots displayed on the dice. Once you have the number, you place a red button on the number.

I like using buttons for game board pieces. They are great for fine motor skills and the game board came we used again and again because it is mark free.

Options:

You could use any of the following to mark the game board permanently if you like:

bingo marker
magic marker
pencil
crayon

You could also put the boards in a plastic sleeve and mark on the sleeve instead of the board itself.

You could used dice with number instead of dots to make the adding more challenging.

Fire Safety Lotus Chart

Fire Safety Themed Activities - Lotus Chart

JDaniel’s teacher mentioned that they will be using lotus charts a lot this year. I wasn’t familiar with them and how they were used when she mentioned them at Back to School night so, I googled them. A lotus chart contains a central box that displays the theme or concept of the chart. Around the center box words or pictures can be placed that illustrate the concept or theme.

I created a lotus chart that JDaniel and I could used to display fire safety words. The wonderful thing about doing a chart like this while exploring a book is that you can look back in the book for words that you want to use and how to spell them.

This is not one of my a fire safety themed activities focused on math, but I thought you would like to see it.

Fire Dog Number Count

Fire Safety Themed Activities - Spot Counting

This is more of a preschool center activity than one for kindergartners, but I love how cute it turned out. JDaniel didn’t have any trouble placing the correct number of button onto each dog to give it spots. I guess I could have made it harder by giving him bigger numbers and bigger dogs to put the buttons on.

Free Worksheets

I get comments all the time about wanting to have the handout or worksheet we have used to explore books. Up until now I have been sharing them. Not because I didn’t want to share them, but because I haven’t taken the time to create PDFs of them.

This week I have copies of the Fire Roll and Count game and the Fire Safety Lotus Charts. All you have to do is click on this Fire Themed Learning Activities and they are your.

What books are you exploring this week?

Picking Apples with My Kindergartner

October 2, 2013 By Deirdre

Visiting an apple orchard was one of the things on our fall bucket list that we wanted to check out first. Actually with only a few weeks left in apple season here in the Carolinas, it really needed to be done first. JDaniel and I decided to check it off our list. Picking apples with my kindergartner was going to be so much fun.

Details on Picking Apples with My Kindergartne

The only draw back with doing it the weekend we did was a forecast of rain. JDaniel and I headed out early in the morning to try to beat the rain.

My husband would have loved to come, but he really needed to study for a class he is taking. It turns out we really could have used him to reach the beautiful red apples at the top of the tree. There were tons waiting at the top of the trees for a really tall person to come and get them.

Both JDaniel and I tried climbing up the trees to get to some of the apples that were out of our reach. Climbing inside the tree also helped us keep warm and dry. It had started to drizzle a little by the time we reached the rows of Galas apples. The temperature had started to drop too. It was way warmer inside the tree than it was outside the tree.

Due to the weather I would say that we spent as much time in the trees as we did out of them. After a long time moving through the archway of branches created by the trees and climbing up them, we both stopped to take a rest. I just love this picture of JDaniel. He looks so comfortable sitting in the branches.

When we had finally filled out baskets, we headed out from the canopy of trees to find that fog had rolled in. It was really odd to hear people coming towards us before we would see them. It reminded me of a scene from the movie Brigadoon. The fog faded as we headed into the the orchard’s purchasing center to pay for our apples and to buy some apple doughnuts.

Apple doughnuts are something Sky Top Orchard is known for. Despite there being a really long line for doughnuts, JDaniel thought we totally needed to wait. After tasting one, I totally agree with him. They were really wonderful. Actually we decided to eat a second one just to make sure they were really good.

By the time we wove around the store in the doughnut line the rain had started to fall again. Picking apples with my kindergartner was fun, wet and slightly chilly adventure. This year he was old enough to climb safely up tree branches and enjoy picking apples.