This stegosaurus handprint is the perfect craft to do with your little dino lover! All you'll need are a few simple supplies, the FREE template, and about 15 minutes of free time. There's no messy paint involved, just use paper to get this project done in no time! The kids will love creating these projects at home, school, or daycare!

After teaching numerous kindergarten scholars in a traditional school setting and now three of my own five children as we are gathered 'round the kitchen table each day, I have learned a few ABCs about teaching the ABCs. Always teach the vowels first. By starting with the vowels, statistics are in your favor. There are only five vowels vs. twenty-one consonants. At least one vowel appears in every word in the English language. Quite simply, once a little learner masters his/her vowels, he can already begin to recognize sounds within every word. Borrow from the "winners." For over thirty years, Vanna White has been called upon to turn the letters for hopeful contestants on the long-running game show, Wheel of Fortune. Without fail, during the "bonus round", the same five letters are announced...R, S, T, L, and N as eager players look on with anticipation while White turns over any/all lit tiles. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize the obvious logic behind the selection of THOSE particular letters. They are COMMON and commonly used in a lot of COMMON words. For this reason, after teaching the five vowels, I teach a handful of commonly used consonants next (R, S, T, L, N, and a few others). When combined with the previously-mastered vowels, these consonants can create many simple one-vowel words. So, even before a child has conquered all the letters in the alphabet, he can already read a large handful of words (like "sat", "man", "bat"). Nothing propels a feeling of success or a love of reading quite like actual READING. Cast off tradition. Although most pre-readers have learned the words and tune to the popular ABC song long before they actually know what an A, B, or C really is, they should not be encouraged to learn the formation or sound of the letter in that same order. Experience has shown that a child who learns the sounds of his letters in alphabetical ORDER has a harder time recognizing them out of order...as in the case of a REAL WORD. You will often times see these children singing the ABC song out loud or in their head in order to remember the sound or name of a particular letter. The "habit" that was created as a toddler of seeing and singing the letters in a particular order is hard to break. But if the formation and sound of the letters are taught APART from the song and the song order, the child's reasoning skills will categorize the song as one concept and the sound/formation as a completely different concept. Therefore, it is much easier for him to learn to truly READ the letter. As a final thought...Although I introduce both the capital and small version of each letter together, I emphasize the small formation the most. Let's face it, the ratio of small letters to large letters in a book is quite substantial. Typically only the first letter of each sentence or an occasional name is ever capitalized. When choosing educational toys and games, you can always spot a QUALITY item if it was created with small letters vs. capitals. Not only for the purpose of reading, but also for manufacturing costs...it is cheaper for a manufacturer to produce a toy with straight lines (as in the case of most capitals) than it is to produce a toy with both straight and curved lines (like small letters). This is why most QUALITY, small letter toys (puzzles, push-button games, blocks, etc.) are more expensive than their capital letter counterparts. Although every child is uniquely wired with his/her own unique way of learning, teaching most little learners to read the ABCs is as simple as A-B-C.

So yesterday was my 16th wedding anniversary and we decided that rather than getting someone to watch the kids we would head out and finally see something we had wanted to see this past year ad a half. We went out to visit the Stan Hywet House and Gardens. Granted the gardens were not a whole lot to look at right now. I really wanted to go during the spring or summer but with baby number 4 on the way I don't want to risk missing it all together. The kids really enjoyed running around and finding things. Before we went we watched two things on You Tube. One was a video about the Tudor Revival style of architecture which just so happened to feature the Stan Hywet house. The boys watched and took notes in their minds of things they wanted to look for in the house. We also watched a three part video about the beginning history of Frank A. Seiberling who was the owner of Goodyear tires. The boys learned all about how he started his business and all of the technological advancements the Goodyear Research team developed. Sorry, no pictures of the inside. They are not allowed. Lucky for us the weather was not to bad and were were able to enjoy both the house and the grounds. With lunch at Olive Garden, a lot of walking, and dinner at Five guys you cant go wrong. Look around your area and see if you have any historical sites you can visit. It may seem as if it would be boring to you and your kids but give anything a try and you may be surprised what will interest your kids.

Making these fun paper bag haircuts is a great scissor skills activity for kids and preschoolers and a great way to make use of recycled materials too.

Little kids will love watching your crafted bunny pop out of his dirt hole with this interactive craft!

Well, its the end of the school year. Time to thank the two ladies that influenced my children in a great direction! I didn't want to do...

These crafts celebrate the amazing power of Jesus over winds and waves, and our own stormy hearts! An interactive sea scene and a spinning plate re-create the events of the story. A "storm bottle" is a fun and decorative way to remember that God is in control, no matter what! Grab your craft gear and get creative!

For more Easter inspiration, please follow our Pinterest boards for our latest pins or visit our Seasonal tab for all of our Easter related posts! Does anyone else feel like Easter snuck up on them this year? I can't believe it's

Items needed: Coffee filters Fall color Markers (orange, red, yellow, brown) Spray bottle Scissors First the kids colored the coffee filters Then I drew a leaf and they cut it out. Then they got to spray them with the squirt bottle! Then we let the dry and hung them! I love activities that filter into the next day. The next afternoon a few kids asked to make more leaves, this time they did it independently, they got out the supplies needed, went through all the steps and even set up a spraying station and a drying station for their leaves!! One of my favorite things about being a preschool teacher is introducing something new, teaching them how to do it by modeling and then watching them do it independently and in their own way!! Just a heads up, the tables were slightly stained along with my finger tips ;) but with a baby wipe or magic eraser it came right off the tables!

Happy Friday! The rest of the Flannel Friday gang is posting felt board ideas for "One World, One Story", the theme of their Summer Reading Program. But I'd like to give a little love to Texas where our theme is "Dig Up a Good Book". I'll be using this flannel board for our insect theme in July. Pretty Ladybug Sung to: "The Muffin Man" Ladybug has 1 black spot, 1 black spot, 1 black spot; Ladybug has 1 black spot, Pretty ladybug! Continue until there are 6 spots. -- PreschoolEducation.com While we sing, I'll place the numeral on the board, too.

Oooodless of Noooodles Every time I walk through our staff room I see a bunch of pool noodles that we never used over the summer. I jumped on pinterest to spark my nogin and get some inspiration and here is what we have been doing with a few of those pool noodles! You can follow More Than ABC's and 123's board on pinterest HERE! My first invitation to play. String and noodles. Later that day we made pumpkin prints with the cut noodles. For this next invitation I cut the noodle at about 6 inches and then cut the noodle in half long ways. I then cut a slit in the middle of each one and put out our new Alphabet Sticks and their name cards. If your interested in these Alphabet sticks I got them here and I have been really happy with them! They have the uppercase letter on one side and the lowercase letter on the other side. I wanted to see where my students were at with their number recognition skills so I took ten and numbered them on one side and dots on the other. During play time I observed a few kids say the numbers and were able to put them in the correct order, others counted the number of dots on the opposite side. For a table time activity I cut up a hand full of the circles into little pieces and added golf tees. and let their little imaginations go... This activity is great for strengthening those fine motor muscles. Pushing the golf tees in as well as pulling them out! Another day at table time I had 3 different color cut noodles and asked the kids to make a pattern. I liked how some kids made their pattern vertically and some made theirs horizontally. We also made a marble run which a few kids decided to investigate how the cut noodles would roll down them. The kids really liked the feel and texture of the cut noodles and played with them in a lot of different ways. Next on the list: fill the sensory bin with water and all of the cut noodles!!

This page is a lot of letter f crafts for kids. There are letter f craft ideas and projects for kids. If you want teach the alphabet easy and fun to kids,you can use these activities. You can also find on this page template for the letter f . This section includes, enjoyable crafts, free ...

What little girl is not into fairies?! They are so cute and dainty and fly! Here’s my daughter as Tinkerbell when she was almost 3. We call her Tinker, as she’s really cute, but has a fire cracker personality! Here are a few fun ideas I’ve come up with to celebrate a Fairy Birthday Party. … Continued

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Another week in our One Year Old Preschool unit on colors, another simple toddler craft! This week we made a giraffe. Here’s how: Materials: yellow cardstock (or construction paper) brown construction paper googly eyes glue stick (we used washable) crayons (optional) Procedure: Cut a small circle (about 1 1/4″) out of the cardstock. Cut […]

Here is a compilation of things we have done for Thanksgiving this year at home with my own kiddos, in my preschool class as well as things my kiddos have done at preschool and daycare. So here is goes......... We read some Thanksgiving books, We watched this.... In my class we played with feathers and playdough. We made a group project with contact paper or 'sticky paper' I got the idea from Deborah over at Teach preschool, you can see hers HERE I took contact paper laid it out on the table, I put 2 eyes down, beak and a gobble, then I laid down the turkey body and let the kids put his feathers on! We then stuck him on our classroom door. We of course made our handprint turkeys! We talked a lot about what we are thankful for! I wrote down each day of the month and everyday a student would share what they were thankful for! We made turkey hats.... A fellow teacher found this on Pinterest, I will try to find the link. My son made this adorable thankful tree in his class. (he has some good teachers!) ;) My one year old daughter made these at her daycare :) Ok so thanks to pinterest and my awesome fellow teachers I wanted to share this cool find! Indian Corn!! I never knew Indian Corn was sooo cool!!! Okay so we did a few things with it and I didn't take pictures of it :( boo.....anywhoo.... I told my fellow teacher about how I saw that if you put indian corn in water it will sprout.....so we had a little scientific competition, I put mine in a bin with shallow water and she put hers in a shallow bin with soil.....I felt very confident mine would grown and I am still convinced that it would have grown much more if one of my little preschoolers didn't have an obsession with water and if he didn't feel the need to dump out the container every day LOL....anyways, hers grew and it looked awesome but here is proof from growing in prek that it does in fact grown in just water! UPDATE: here!! Our corn is growing out of control this year!!! another one of my awesome fellow teachers came into the staff room and said....we just popped popcorn....from the indian corn.....WHAT!!?? Cool! She said they put a half of the indian corn into a brown lunch bag and put it into the microwave....and out popped pop corn....imagine that! I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving, I have so much to be thankful for and I am looking forward to a 4 day weekend to spend with my kiddos!!!

There are so many ways that you can play and explore with Water Beads! I collected 32 ideas, but there are so many more if you keep sea...

~Smiley is currently 28 months old~ ABCs... This week, we covered the letter F. We read many books about fish, frogs, and fox. We did a letter F worksheet, where Smiley colored all the items that begin with the letter F. Smiley really likes the rainbow fish books, so I wanted to focus many of our F activities on the books by Marcus Pfister. Smiley colored a couple of rainbow fish pictures that I found on the web... For our foam letter activity, I really wanted to incorporate our rainbow fish theme. I cut out a letter F, a tail, three fins, a head and a mouth. and lots of scales... Smiley then glued the scales on the letter F and we attached fins, tail, head and mouth. In the end, we colored some of the scales with a glittery silver glue to make it look like the rainbow fish :) Smiley loved this craft, especially gluing on the scales and decorating the fish with the glittery glue... If you don't add scales and make the F in a different color from the tail, fins and head, the letter F will stand out much better. Smiley already knows the alphabet though, so I didn't worry too much about the F not standing out as much... I just added my rainbow fish craft idea to the Ultimate Alphabet Craft Collection. Check it out for some other cool alphabet crafts :) Colors and Shapes... Smiley is really into worksheets right now. He colored many pictures in different colors... He found and colored all the circles on this sheet... We matched colors with this game... And worked on a mix/match puzzle... Gross Motor... I sometimes forget to mention on here that Smiley is a very active little boy who needs lots and lots of physical activity ;) We do lots of movement activities at home... and we go to the park at least once a day, if not twice... Smiley is starting to get the hang of his tricycle. Pedalling is still a bit tricky for him though... This boy LOVES the swing... He does really well with the horses now. Climbing on and off on his own and bouncing by himself. And he spends much time just RUNNING.... (he really only nows one speed, and it's running) Teeny Tiny Tot School... The tiny tot LOVES the swing as well :) and going on the slide with daddy and her big brother... and hanging out with mommy... She started to really enjoy touch and feel books as well...

By Tiffany Rudd I realize this isn't a very holiday-ish topic to post on Halloween, but I found tons of fun candy corn activities to make...

abc exercise cards

Oooodless of Noooodles Every time I walk through our staff room I see a bunch of pool noodles that we never used over the summer. I jumped on pinterest to spark my nogin and get some inspiration and here is what we have been doing with a few of those pool noodles! You can follow More Than ABC's and 123's board on pinterest HERE! My first invitation to play. String and noodles. Later that day we made pumpkin prints with the cut noodles. For this next invitation I cut the noodle at about 6 inches and then cut the noodle in half long ways. I then cut a slit in the middle of each one and put out our new Alphabet Sticks and their name cards. If your interested in these Alphabet sticks I got them here and I have been really happy with them! They have the uppercase letter on one side and the lowercase letter on the other side. I wanted to see where my students were at with their number recognition skills so I took ten and numbered them on one side and dots on the other. During play time I observed a few kids say the numbers and were able to put them in the correct order, others counted the number of dots on the opposite side. For a table time activity I cut up a hand full of the circles into little pieces and added golf tees. and let their little imaginations go... This activity is great for strengthening those fine motor muscles. Pushing the golf tees in as well as pulling them out! Another day at table time I had 3 different color cut noodles and asked the kids to make a pattern. I liked how some kids made their pattern vertically and some made theirs horizontally. We also made a marble run which a few kids decided to investigate how the cut noodles would roll down them. The kids really liked the feel and texture of the cut noodles and played with them in a lot of different ways. Next on the list: fill the sensory bin with water and all of the cut noodles!!

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These chopstick helpers are AWESOME!!!! Looking for a great way to strengthen those fine motor muscles? Chopsticks, pom pom balls, and a tray. My kiddos love this and are getting really good at using the chopsticks and can now pick up the smaller pom pom balls!!! I wanted to get an idea of where the kiddos in my class were with their letter recognition. I put out some letter cards and told the kids that we were going to go on a letter hunt. They were to look around the room and find letter and match them to the card. I was able to see which children may need more support and practice with letter recognition without having to test them with flashcards!!! They did so well! The found letters from puzzles, the magnet board and from the letter beads we have. Then we got to put them all away! Great sorting activity! Another easy way to set up a sorting activity is to simply put out colored paper for the kids to match/sort. This is how I set up our independent table in our table time rotation.

Animal Tracks painting craft for toddlers or preschool

We're getting a lot of mileage out of our googly eyes this week. To make these cute (and oh so educational) shape monsters, all we needed was craft foam shapes, googly eyes, and lots and lots of glue. A is never happier than when she's squeezing glue out onto something in copious amounts. Googly eyes were just a nice bonus. With this one little activity we worked on our fine motor control, discussed the shapes and colors of the monsters, counted each of their eyes and talked about which eyes were bigger and smaller. Not bad for 50 cents worth of craft materials! Go Away, Big Green Monster! by Ed Emberley The Emberleys have a whole series of monster books out, but this was the one I could get my hands on. I'm so glad I did! Ingenious die cutting on each page makes this book such fun to read. As you turn each page a monster slowly appears, revealing his big yellow eyes and sharp white teeth through the die cuts on the page. Half way through the book you yell "You don't scare me!" and the subsequent pages hide each of the features until he's disappeared. I fell in love with The Very Hungry Caterpillar at age 4 because of the die cuts in the book. I can only imagine how much I would have loved this one. My girls certainly do! I'm linking up to: - Play Academy @ Nurture Store - Show & Tell @ ABC & 123 - Tot Tuesday @ My Delicious Ambiguity

Our caterpillar week has been so much fun! Not only are we enjoying watching our caterpillars metamorphisis (they have formed into their chr...

Step 1. Gather your supplies. Step 2. Collect a large heart, medium heart, small heart wood shape and 1 regular craft stick. Paint each shape with acrylic paint and set aside to dry. Tip: on the top heart paint the shape shown as the inside of the bunny’s ears. Step 3. … Continued

Wiggly worm letter craft for the letter W

Welcome to Tot Treasures! Follow along as we explore the art of play ~ We hope you find inspiration from our adventures and discoveries.

Our letter "C" week was actually two weeks -- I blame this on a super busy weekend last weekend that left me virtually no time to swap out the new curriculum. It worked out okay, though, because Ethan was really into the "C" week tot trays and, well, all of the cats in our lesson plan. (We have four cats at home, so he's a little obsessed.) A few weeks ago, I added a "listening station" to our tot school room. I had the idea to set out an array of vinyl records by artists beginning with that week's letter for Ethan to choose to listen to. This week, of course, was C. It was my first week doing this and a little bit of an epic failure because one of my favorite artists, Iron & Wine, released a new album that I had gotten on vinyl and proceeded to listen to every waking moment. Ethan is apparently a huge fan of the new Iron & Wine, too, which meant he had no arguments with listening to it on repeat constantly rather than suffering through some of the other records that I found in the closet by "C" artists. I think it will end up being a fun addition to our classroom, though. This week, a lot of the trays were picture matching. Ethan has really gotten into matching games for some strange reason so while I initially felt silly for so many redundant trays, he ended up really enjoying them. The matching game with the "C" items was his favorite -- he asked to do it several times each day. Since he loves cats, I made a cat and color matching game where the goal was to match each cat by color. I also made a matching game with cars. The goal was to match each colored car to the similarly colored letter "C." Ethan absolutely loved this game and pointing out the colors of each car. I had made a cup stringing activity that ended up being a total flop. Ethan got that cup began with the letter C, but that was the extent of his interest with this activity. He absolutely refused to pay any attention to this activity, which was weird because even though we haven't done stringing in a while, he used to really enjoy it. I was surprised at how much he loved the letter C sensory bin mostly because it was just a mish-mosh of random things I dug up at the dollar store. I had found a cow book, a box of crayons, a caterpillar, cars, a cat and some letter C flashcards. The final tot tray of the week was a make the letter C activity that I made using a dotted-line letter C print-out from Twisty Noodle and a cup of Chex cereal. Ethan helped me point out the letter C on the Chex box and then he had fun putting the pieces of Chex cereal onto the dotted lines. It was a nice idea in theory until he remembered that he loved Chex cereal and, well, I'm not sure the C ever got fully filled -- but his tummy did. We had a lot of great art projects and activities for C week. We spent a lot of time coloring with chalk. Ethan had asked to go to Grandma's house to color with his chalk, so we did just that. Ethan also had fun decorating a crown. I had cut out the "crown shape" from construction paper earlier in the week. One afternoon after his nap, Ethan selected which art supplies he'd like to use. Naturally, he chose dyed macaroni, googly eyes and paint! It ended up turning out super cute! Ethan loves to go to the beach and make sand castles. I thought it would be fun to make a castle at home. We mixed some play sand with some shaving cream and a little bit of glue. I printed out a sand castle print-out from Twisty Noodle. Ethan helped me squirt some glue on the paper for extra hold and then got to work painting with the sand to make a castle of his own. He ended up using his hands along with the brushes because it just felt so cool, so it ended up being a really great sensory project. It took about 24 hours, but the sand/glue/shaving cream mixture ended up drying well. I did place a laminating sheet over the final project to keep any stray sand from falling out and it looked great once completed! We painted a lot of fabulous TwistyNoodle print-outs this week: several of cats and some of the letter C. I love their free printables very much -- they make a great spur of the moment art project! My favorite art project Ethan did this week was the letter C cat. I cut out a large letter C and a smaller letter C from a heavy cardstock-type white paper along with two pointy ears. I assembled the cat so the smaller C was the tail and then cut out some whiskers and two tiny little C's (for the inner ear!) from pink construction paper. I did all of this while Ethan was napping and when he woke up, he had a cute cat ready to decorate! He loved painting this activity and laughed the entire time, insisting he was painting "Ethan's kitties" (even though they're all different colors and none are orange like he chose!). When the cat was dry, he helped me glue on two eyes and the pink construction paper parts I had made earlier. We also made a cotton cloud, mostly because Ethan has a new love for gluing. He glued the entire thing himself and did a surprisingly great job on squeezing the glue out correctly. On a whim, I had drawn some C's on a piece of paper and given Ethan some fingerpaint to trace the C's that I drew. He mostly traced the C's but also painted all over the paper when he was finished. It was still a fun activity that I think we might continue for the rest of the letters, toddler willing. Because he had so much fun with our C cat craft, Ethan had asked to paint more cats. Lately he's been really into painting things and then describing to me what he painted, which is hands-down one of my favorite parenting "highlights" so far. I absolutely love when he paints something and then tells me what's on the paper, especially when it's something we did together earlier or a fun memory he had from a past activity. In this case, he painted cats and then asked for "eyes" to put onto the cats faces. So super sweet. Of course, what "C" week could be complete without baking some cupcakes with Grandma?! LINKING UP WITH:

Our caterpillar week has been so much fun! Not only are we enjoying watching our caterpillars metamorphisis (they have formed into their chr...

This Buckle My Shoe printable pack is a great nursery rhyme for young children to learn, especially great for practicing their counting.