Mittens and Pom Poms

One day this week, Kate and I looked at a few crafts on Pinterest, and she chose to make stained glass mittens.

I cut out the black mitten outline and stuck it onto contact paper.  She tore pieces of tissue paper and placed the pieces within the mitten outline.

 After finishing one pink mitten, she decided the other mitten should be a different color.

Then we moved on to mitten math.  I cut mitten shapes out of white card stock and added numbers with the corresponding number of dots.

Kate found the correct colored pom poms and placed them on the dots, counting each time.  She has known all of these colors for a long time and she is also pretty good at counting; we mostly worked on number recognition.

Our next activity was to help Kate develop fine motor skills and hand strength.  We have these neat tools she used with the pom poms.

 I enjoyed the most wonderful pom pom ice cream treats made just for me by Kate.

Numbers and Letters

We had school vacation last week and I wanted to work on letter formation with R and number formation with C.  R is just learning how to form some of the letters of the alphabet.  C occasionally writes his numbers backwards (I think this is pretty common for his age - 5).  Anyway, they both needed some practice and I didn't want it to be boring.

I was looking in the cupboards when I noticed a few boxes of Jello.  Instantly, I remembered a post my friend, Amy at Teach Mama, wrote a while back about writing in Jello.

I dumped some Jello powder on two trays and put C and R to work!  I called out letters for R and numbers for C.  At this point, R is working on forming uppercase letters. 

I called out two, and occasionally three, digit numbers for C to write.  The numbers 2, 3, and 7 seem to be the trickiest for him so I made certain to call out those numbers often.

The best part about this practice is that mistakes are easily fixed, just smooth out the Jello and start over.  I was able to sneak in a little letter and number formation, and C and R just thought it was fun! 

Yummy too!