Glimmercat Education: preschool ideas

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Letter of the Week for N

Let's talk about the letter N! There are some fun crafts showcased in this blog and if you want printable lesson plans, the Letter of the Week packet for N is available in my Teacher's store.

Who would have thought that the letter N holds one of the most favorite of preschool crafts that is out there? And the easiest? Because every little child is fascinated with their own name.

N is for Name!

As soon as my little ones turned two, this was one of the first little crafts they did. Here's my daughter working on the first letter of her name at age two.

For smaller fingers, it is better to get larger manipulatives. Here, she was working with large beads, and I put on lots of glue so it was very easy for her to do this.

As she got older, she worked on her entire name, in capitals. You can see her brother (just turned five) is practicing his name with lower case letters.

Cheerios are still our go-to item to glue whenever we do this name craft. Because it is so fun for the kids to snack as they glue. But you could also use dried beans, rice, dried pasta or beads.

I figured we had better include a Name Craft Activity in our "Letter of the Week for N" packet, but you could easily do this without a special "Name Craft Sheet".

I thought it would be fun to try something smaller with this name craft, so I picked up some little beads at Dollar Tree. Turns out this was great for my 5 year old who got to try out patterns on his letters. (Look at that intense concentration!)

Next, we have the old standby for the letter N: N is for Nest!

The important ingredient needed for this craft is shredded wheat cereal. All-Bran cereal also, would work great!

We used the shredded wheat shards in the bottom of the bag, but you could simply crunch up a shredded wheat piece to get all the little pieces that make the nest look like it's made up of small sticks. We spread glue across the nest and my daughter sprinkled the cereal over it.

Then, after the nest had dried, we glued on two pom poms for the bird in the nest. I had cut out the bird's beak and the egg. Googly eyes completed it...

In our letter of the week packet, we also have a Dot to Dot activity that shows birds in a nest.

The shtick (or Story to Bridge understanding) for this letter is that Glimmercat is being chased away from a nest by a Mother Bird who screeches, "N-n-n-nuh-nuh!!!"
Which, of course, is the sound of N.

N is for Night

My son has always liked city sky-lines, so maybe this is where this craft idea came from. Above, the craft insert is pictured. We recommend having a thick piece of cardboard or styrofoam to help poke the thumb-tack through the holes.

He poked a tiny hole through every gray circle, and when we taped it to a window, the light showed off the skyline.

You could also take the finished product and glue it around a little jar and then put a tealight inside at night-time. That would make a fun little night-light.

Our last craft for N goes along with our Reading Literacy Worksheet. We focused on the incredibly beautiful pictures of Jerry Pinkney's Caldecott winning Noah's Ark Picture Book.

Our Reading Literacy worksheet goes along with this book...

I then did a follow up craft that involves a paper plate with my daughter.

After cutting the plate and gluing it together, she painted it brown. Then we glued in the pieces that come with our Noah's Ark Craft Sheet. She was very careful and got to place the animals herself.

I think her older brother was a little jealous of her finished product and wished he had volunteered to make one, too.

This Noah's Ark Craft is also available as a stand-alone craft in our Noah's Ark Reading Literacy Activity Packet.

For a lot more N activities, both printables, reading literacy activities, flash cards and a Letter N Matching Game, check out our entire complete Letter of the Week for N activity packet.

Letter of the Week for Y

Letter of the Week for Z

Zazzle-Dazzle, we have a letter Z letter of the Week packet here. Let's talk about this fun letter Z.

We begin our letter of the week with introducing the letter along with a snoozing Glimmercat. Notice, she is surrounded by zinnias.

The old standby for Letter Z is usually the Zebra, and we definitely have our Z is for Zebra Day, including a Zebra "Matching the Letters" practice sheet.

These pages are such good review for connecting the capital and lowercase letters.

Now, you could make little foam zebra heads like this:

But in our packet, we have this interesting craft, that involves putting the stripes on a Zebra in a unique way, rather than gluing or painting them on. And it was fun!

First, I cut out the zebras and the rectangles for the kids. There are so many little tiny details on the zebra form, that it was better to not over-stress them by having them attempt this.

Next, I put just a touch of glue-stick on the back of the zebra and glued him temporarily inside of an empty salad box. (On the craft page, I suggest using a cardboard box, and that would work too, but this was helpful for us to use, since you could watch your zebra stripes appear. You can see, we have also added a line of black paint inside the box, near the zebra and there is a toy ball inside, too. (The toy ball didn't work as well as we were hoping, so we upgraded to a marble to get it to roll well).

Then the fun began. My son shook that box and he twisted and turned it, and as the marble rolled through the black paint, stripes magically appeared on the zebra.

What fun we had! The pictures are a little fuzzy because as you can tell, there was much shaking and jostling involved with this project. And it turned out great!

After Zebras, one of the next letter Z favorites is Zoo. We created several activities for Zoo.

This one involves making zoo animals out of rocks and the little images seen here. At the end, we had become zookeepers with our small collection of rock animals:

But we also created a printable where kids can create their own little zoo with this cut and paste activity:

For our reading literacy activity, we chose the book, "Never Ever Shout at the Zoo". And for our activity, the kids will need to use ordinal number understanding to put everything in order.

For our last craft, we chose to do something with zinnias. We made our petals with fingerprints.

Easy and satisfying! Those are the best kind of crafts. Granted, this can be a tad messy.

We started with the outer layer of petals, and we turned the paper around to make it easier to put on the thumbprints.

And then we found it was best to stand up to really get into those thumbprints. Look at all those fun petals!

For a lot more Z activities, printables, reading literacy activities, flash cards and a Letter Z Matching Game, head over to our teacher store.

Letter of the Week for Y

Our Letter of the Week packet for Y is up and running. No yawns here...well, actually, we did add a Yawn craft, just for fun.

We set up our lesson plans for this Letter of the Week packet to focus on something that starts with Y for every Day. So, for instance, the first day we focus on Yaks.

As you can see, we have a fun little Yak printable craft and a Yak dot to dot. On another day, we focus on "Yarn". Children can put together this little puzzle:

And, they can also Glue some Yarn along our Yarn Craft, as displayed by the red color...

Now, I love to add in other ideas that you could do here on this blog, and here is one that was a lot of fun, even though it is a very hands-on craft that is not something you can print out. But first, the song intro to this idea:

Yeah, we cheated a little bit by calling a "Yellow Submarine" a craft for "Y". But why not? The song was originally intended as a nonsense song for children, according to Sir Paul McCartney, and it is still as catchy to little ones today as it was to adults back in the 70's.

Here's what we did to make ours:

That's a toilet paper tube, two holders from an egg carton, and a yellow straw.

The little gold thingys are beads I had on hand that looked like they would make good portholes. (You could also use little white O stickers, or maybe even stick a photo of your child on the submarine, to make it look like he or she is looking out the window.)

We gathered a large piece of yellow vinyl (from a plastic tablecloth from the Dollar Store) around the whole she-bang. Cinched it up with a little clear rubber band, right around the straw.

Then, we took another holder from an egg carton that has a hole already created in the top, slid it over our straw, and hot-glued it into place. I also hot-glued on the little brassy circles.

Then, to ensure it was really yellow, I had the kids finish off the top piece with yellow. Make sure and sing "We all Live in a Yellow Submarine" while you do this craft. That's definitely a prerequisite.

For our Reading Literacy Activity, we chose this book:

This little book is all about a child who has a "Yes Day!" with his parents where every answer to every question is "Yes!" Such a fun story, and here is our Reading Literacy Activity that goes along with it:

And to follow up, we did another Yes craft. You could use items like plastic beads or dried beans and rice for this craft, but we decided to use edibles that don't need to be glued down.

But "Yes!" they DO get to be eaten up upon completion of the craft.

It's one of those simple, low prep, low mess kind of crafts where everyone is happy with the result at the end. Especially the kids.

This was definitely a favorite. Only trick is making sure they don't eat everything up before they fill in their letters. But then, if they do, does anyone really mind all that much?

The final craft we came up with was a new one. Y is for Yawn.

For making a Yawn, you have to create a character to do the yawning, so this picture is of a charming young man with squinting eyes so that when his mouth opens (as children pull down on the tab), it completes the look of an actual yawn.

The craft has a color code, where children choose a color for the skin and then fill in every shape with a triangle the color they chose. We talked a bit about varying skin colors and what might be realistic, but if you wanted, I'm sure your child would happily create a purple skinned boy with orange hair. Keeping the skin a consistent color, however, does help with the perception of the yawn.

But the one thing that MUST be added, no matter what, is the Yawn sound effect. This is where you get laughs and giggles and many yawn sound effects will be tried out and enjoyed by all.

For a lot more Y activities, printables, reading literacy activities, flash cards and a Letter Y Matching Game, head over to our teacher store.

Letter of the Week for Y

Letter of the Week for Z

Pages

Letter of the Week for N

Letter of the Week for Z

Letter of the Week for Y