Primary Colors together make BROWN

First we read "Brown as an Acorn" by Molly Dingles and made our own acorn. (Hailey was going to a neighborhood preschool for a short amount of time, and I was in charge on brown one week. I had the acorn base and top already cut out.) Hailey glued the top on herself and then we put stripes on the acorn top to look more realistic.

This would also be a good activity to do with the Letter A. This book is about all the brown things you can find at a campsite. It would be easy to point out that acorns grown on trees and squirrels like acorns.

Then we did the Brown Itsy Bitsy Book.

We read "White Rabbit's Color book" by Alan Baker and made our own brown paint in a Ziploc bag.

Secondary Colors: Purple

Hailey continues to color specific sections of the whole picture as she colored her Purple Itsy Bitsy Book. She's coloring one grape in this picture.

Then we read "Purple as a Plum" by Molly Dingles to identify purple items and "White Rabbit's Color Book" by Alan Baker to learn how to make purple. We then made purple paint ourselves but it looks more brown to me.
To finish off, Hailey made a collage with purple paint and purple foam shapes.

Secondary Colors: Green

Hailey colored the Itsy Bitsy Book Green. An interesting thing that Hailey started doing today was coloring a specific portion of what she wanted to color. In this picture she is coloring the very tip on the dragon's tail. Also, she colored the eye on the snake and that was all. She tried as hard as a 2 year-old could to color within the lines. It's fun to see her develop.

We read "Green as a Frog" by Molly Dingles so we could point out all the things that are green. However, Hailey insisted to called it red instead of green.
Finally we read "White Rabbit's Color Book" by Alan Baker to learn how to make green. We mixed yellow and blue paint so Hailey could add paint to her collage along with feathers, foam shapes, and green glitter glue.

Secondary Colors: Orange

We first colored the Itsy Bitsy Book orange.Then I read her the "White Rabbit's Color Book" by Alan Baker. We only read about mixing yellow and red together to get orange.

Then we tried to make orange ourselves.

Hailey finished up by making a collage with feathers, foam shapes, felt and paint.

Primary Colors: Blue

I couldn't get the "blue as a..." book from the library so we read "Turquoise As a Parakeet" by Molly Dingles since it's close enough to blue.
Then Hailey colored her Itsy Bitsy Blue Book with markers.

For our collage today we used, blue paint, foam shapes. feathers, felt, and glitter glue.

She really had a hay day with the materials and kept piling it on. She also wanted to cover the feathers with a "blanket" (the blue felt stripes) so they could go night-night.

Primary Colors: Yellow

Today we had a friend over who joined us for Hailey School. For Yellow we read "Yellow as a Lemon" by Molly Dingles. It has about 12 items that are yellow, then on the last page puts it all together so you can find the yellow items. Then we color our Itsy Bitsy Yellow book with markers.

After that we did a color collage with paint, foam shapes, felt, and feathers.

Z is for Zebra

To finish off the alphabet we did Zebra for Z.
We colored our Itsy Bitsy Book to be familiar with other words that start with Z.
Then we made a Paper Bag Zebra. Hailey wasn't in the coloring mood today.
She had fun playing with the bag and pasting the pieces on.
We read "Zeely Zebra" by Barbara Derubertis together. It's goes through a story on how this zebra, who has a dream to be on the racing team, makes it with hard work.

Y is for Yellow Yarn and Yogurt

The Letter Y has a lot of mini activities instead of a big one with only one theme.

First, we started with the Itsy Bitsy Y Book.
Then I had Hailey cut the yarn into pieces to put on our Y. (I crocheted a yellow blanket so I had extra yarn.)
Hailey first put the glue on the Y then covered it with yarn. She was excited when she made an X with the yarn all by herself. (I didn't help or suggest this she just pulled the yarn straight and then crossed the other piece with the first one. She's very smart!!!)
Here's our finished product. (Hailey's on the left and mine is on the right.)
Next we did yogurt painting.

I had Hailey squeeze the food coloring on the different piles and stir with her fingers.

Hailey doesn't like being messy so she enjoyed watching (and telling) me what to do. We "drew" a flower, the letter H for Hailey, and the letter Y in the yogurt. She also ate some especially the blue colored one. (We used vanilla yogurt.)

I couldn't think of any books to go along with this. I didn't want a yellow book since we'll be doing colors soon.

W is for Whale

Today was W and the lesson went very smoothly. We had three coloring activities and three books (including the Alphabook) and it still didn't take us a long amount of time.
We used water paints to color our Itsy Bitsy W Book. I get excited when we can sneak other W words like that into our activities.
We also used water paints to color our Orca whales. Someday I'll have to take her to Sea World to see Shamu.
We made a whale by finger painting. Hailey enjoyed this but didn't get too messy.
TaDa! Our finished products!

We finished up by reading"Who's in the Ocean?" by Dorothea DePrisco and "Arctic Babies" by Kathy Darling, photographs by Tara Darling.

This letter didn't take as long as I thought it would. We had a great time and was able to clean our mess easily.

V is for Volcanoes

V was a very hard letter to find an activity for. I was so excited when the light bulb went on and thought about volcanoes.

We first colored our Itsy Bitsy V Book with markers.

We looked at the pictures of "DK Readers: Eruption! The Story of Volcanoes" by Anita Ganeri first to help her understand what a volcano is. Earlier I went to http://www.sciencebob.com/experiments/volcano.html to find directions on how to make a volcano. Since the directions dealt with a smaller container we didn't have the huge overflow of messy stuff like I expected but Hailey enjoyed it.

I had her help me scoop out baking soda and pour in the dish soap. Then we put the red food dye in.

To make it go, we put in vinegar.

Hailey wanted to do it again so we did it in a smaller paper cup.
This was a lot of fun and different from our usual craft. Hailey enjoyed pouring the ingredients in and watching it go. I know she doesn't understand what a volcano is but that will come in time.

T is for Tiger

Hailey was excited about the big cats that we saw at the Hoogle Zoo. So, for the letter T we did tigers.

This picture was taken at Hoogle Zoo and was her favorite thing there.

We first colored our Itsy Bitsy T Book with crayons. My mom had a book of new crayons. I forgot how nice it is to color with new crayons.

Then we painted paper plates to make a tiger. Hailey loves paints. I had a cup of water and paper towels to clean the brush before she switched colors.

I cut out the stripes, eyes, ears, and nose and Hailey pasted them on her plate. Hailey was entertained with this craft for a long time. An apron is necessary when dealing with paints.
After we were done making our tigers, I showed her pictures of the tigers we saw at the Omaha Zoo. Kyle likes white tigers.

We read "Tiny Tiger" by Barbara deRubertis. It's about a shy tiger who ends up making friends. I also got "Mother to Tigers" by George Ella Lyon from the library. It's based on a true story about a woman who took care of baby animals in her apartment. It has beautiful pictures but Hailey was done with Hailey School when we started that book.

I was also able to take this picture at the Omaha Zoo.

S is for Snowman

Hailey loves "Once there was a Snowman", so I thought Snowman for the letter S would be a lot of fun.
We colored our Itsy Bitsy S Book with watercolors.

Then we had a couple of ideas on how to make a snowman. One idea is to use white paint. Another is to use three paper plates and attach them with brads. With that one you would focus on dressing the snowman. The one we end up doing was using cotton balls to make the snowman.

I cut out the circles and glued them onto the blue construction paper for her, so it'll be easier to see where the cotton balls go.

This is a cute file folder game from Preschool Printables. You match the snowman up by colors. Hailey did a great job at it. I also made the Number Snowflake one but I don't think Hailey is ready for it yet.

We read "The Biggest Snowman Ever" by Steven Kroll and Jeni Bassett and "All you need for a Snowman" by Alice Schertle. "The Biggest Snowman Ever" is a cute book with mice and "All you need for a Snowman" is fun and an easy read. I also got "The Tiny Snowflake" by Arthur Ginolfi but Hailey was losing interest by the end of Hailey School. "The Tiny Snowflake" is about finding why we are special and understanding that everyone is special.

And of course at the end we sang "Once there was a Snowman".