Glimmercat Education: inchworm

After Christmas, I thought I would break things up a bit for Little Miss by giving her an introduction to shapes. So we played with shapes and began chatting about patterns, and this was a nice little break from our letters. Breaks are beautiful things.

Teaching Tip: Remember, just like you enjoy a good break, your child does too, and can come back refreshed and ready to go.

But, our break was now over, and we are at the letter I. Fun surprises lurked here for us, when I chose to reintroduce Little Miss to the Letter of the Week packets by choosing the Glimmercat Path of Motion Color Sheet and our little Inchworm Craft.

First, let's get the story on our I letter card here. Glimmercat is surprised by this little inchworm in the picture. And so she jumps in surprise and lets out a short i sound! That's the I sound in pig. So, I explained this to Little Miss and then showed her how to write the big I, starting at the top and going down, and then finishing off with the top and bottom.

Then she jumped in with the coloring. We also practiced saying the short I sound in a surprised sort of way. Which is very fun for Preschool.

Here's a little serendipity that was quite a treat. I had picked up YumEarth Organics Gummy Worms the other day as a treat for my kiddos, so I opened them up (figured it was a timely opening to inchworms), and look at these cute little things!

They look more like Inchworms than any other Gummy Worm out there! Are they not adorable? Such a great find for teaching about inchworms! Now, since inchworms are new to Little Miss, we popped onto YouTube and found this little inchworm gem:

Isn't that a cute one? I like seeing the different sizes worms and the funny way they seem to feel the air before they continue on their little inching way. And we munched on our little gummy inchworms while we watched.

And then, I printed out our Inchworm Craft. It looks like this:

And Little Miss cut out the pink worm and slid her pipe cleaner through the holes (with a little help).

And then we slid the little guy along the pipe cleaner so that he moved along an awfully lot like the inchworms in that video.

And that's all for our first day back. It was an easy entry back into Letter of the Week, and I think Little Miss is pleased to be back in our regular work, too.

For this and many other crafts and activities, we have a Letter of the Week packet for I available in our store.

Imagine the letter I! We focused on crafts zeroed in on the Short i sound, so if you're wondering where "Ice cream" or "Icicle" are hiding out, they are in abundance on Pinterest and you won't have any trouble finding them. When it comes to Letter of the Week, I feel it is important to begin with the short sounds of vowels for toddlers. Long sounds usually get introduced later.

The two main creatures we use to discuss the letter I in our letter I packet are inchworms and iguanas. Let's begin with inchworms...

To begin with, our character Glimmercat walks up on an Inchworm and is startled into gasping out the short letter I sound! We follow this up with an Inchworm Craft (see below).

This was one of those easy and extremely satisfying crafts to complete, and all it required was a pair of scissors and a pipe cleaner. You don't have to add on the pompom and googly eyes like we did here, but if so, that makes it all the more fun.

This little guy really does "inch along" on his pipe cleaner way, just like a real inchworm might. And if you can pick up a little bag of YumEarth Organics' Gummy Worms, they are just the right size for tiny inchworms.

Okay, first, iguanas are such a fun creature to introduce to preschoolers. They are such fascinating reptiles and really are modern day dinosaurs, so what's not to love, right?

Here is a nice little Video of an iguana walking along a beach, that provides a beautiful introduction of the iguana for those children who have never seen one before.

Our lesson plan for our Iguana Day looks like this:

Our Iguana craft uses shape matching for students to discern where to place the legs and tail and other body parts. These shapes are small, but my daughter was able to complete her Iguana Craft almost entirely by herself.

Let's move on to I is for Igloo:

If you remember, my husband and kids built a real igloo this past winter over here.
But, if you are in a traditional classroom setting, that might not help a whole lot, so images of
real igloos or pictures for context will be helpful. Like this:

Regardless, building a crafty igloo is definitely something that preschool kids can do with just a little help. In our I "Letter of the Week" packet, we begin with a basic shape for the children to begin piling on their popcorn peanuts or sugar cubes:

This is the basic outline of an igloo. For our own practice on this igloo craft, we tried out the packing peanuts and foam chunks.

We used Tacky glue and we built the igloos in stages so that at times the glue could dry. This made it easier for the kids to grow their igloos.

The other thing we did is demonstrated in the above photo. We added a small balloon for structure, and built up the last of our ice chunks on top of the balloon, trying to keep the glue just on our chunks, and not on the balloon.