Chinese New Year

This year the Chinese new year falls on 8th February. I got acquainted with this festival while I was living in Singapore. The whole island would come alive with beautiful red decorations and  every once in a while the loud sounds of cymbals would reverberate around the town signaling a dragon dance. The mouth watering pineapple tarts and the sales used to add to the fun. For the Chinese, this was a time to bond with their families and for us it was vacation time. We always planned a trip outside Singapore because the whole island used to shut down for 4 days. There was a lot of excitement and joy in the air and it wasn't difficult to sense it.
 Sigh! Good ol' memories!

And to refresh those memories, I created a fun learning pack for little ones. I enjoyed making this unit, and I am sure the little ones will enjoy doing the activities as much.

In this unit, you will find word and picture puzzles.

A number order puzzle.

Memory game cards.

Lots of math activities.

Literacy worksheets.

Beginning sound cards.

Grab this unit from my Teachers Pay Teachers Store and have fun teaching your kids about Chinese New Year.

Indian Independence Day

This week is full of celebrations because the Indian Independence Day is just around the corner. And learning can be integrated in a fun way when ever there is any kind of  celebration. I am sharing some of the activities that I did with my little sweeties. The activities focus a lot on literacy and numeracy skills but  most of them are game based so kids participated with enthusiasm.

I read out a factual book about India to them.You can grab your copy from HERE.

We made an Indian flag by painting ice cream sticks with the Tri-color. The older kids added a sentence underneath the flag. I wanted them to practice reading the sentence from left to right and top to bottom, so I cut up the words and let them stick the words in order.

Since we are practicing reading CVC words, I made an activity where the kids had to take the Indian boy to the national flag by coloring all the Vowel I words since India begins with I.

The younger kids just had to find the letter I.

We made rhyming words with the word 'flag'.

We also put together national symbol puzzles. The kids had to read the words and match them to the pictures.

We fixed some number order puzzles too!

We rolled the dice and graphed the national symbols.

We played a memory match game. The kids who found a matching pair of the national symbol, got a sticker of the Indian Flag.

Bingo was a lot of fun and the competitive spirit of this game surely got the kids excited!

We also colored kites of different sizes.

You can get all these activities from my TPT STORE.

I will be coming back soon with some more fun activities and a freebie! So do come back to check out!

Farm Activities and Ideas

Any animal theme gets me super charged, simply because kids adore all kinds of animals and a lot of learning can take place if you talk about something that captures the interest of little minds.

We start our farm theme by reading some fabulous books:

    

   

We make a KWL chart to track what we know about farm aniamls, what we want to know and what we will learn at the end of the unit.

We talk in detail about how a cow helps us. Children go berserk when they get to milk a cow!

 We make a graph of our favorite flavor of milk.

We make hand prints on the cow and write facts that we have learnt about cows.

Children also make individual cow crafts.

 We also make yummy butter which we eat with crackers!

The butter is made by putting some whipping cream in a jar. Children take turns shaking it, till it solidifies. Add a little salt and voila its ready to be enjoyed!

We also watch a video to see how a chick hatches from an egg.

And follow it up by completing an activity on the life cycle of a chicken.

We make hand print hens.

We do a lot of animal crafts and then display them all together on a bulletin board. The idea for this board came from pinterest.

We read the book "The growing soup" by Lois Ehlert and briefly talk about what all a farmer grows on the farm.

 

Children draw their favorite vegetables.

We also set up a farmers market and children engage in pretend play. 

I will end this post by sharing my favorite song for this unit- "The Wishy Washy Washerwoman". Its a great song to sing as it teaches alliteration, coordination when you add movements and children get to cross the mid line which is essential for reading.

Hope you found the ideas and activities useful. Do go through my farm unit. It has literacy and numeracy activities for small group work. I have a detailed POST on the same.

Farm Unit

Finally! I have been able to complete my farm literacy and numeracy pack. I started working on the unit in April and it took me one full month to get it all together. There were so many ideas going on in my head that i was unable to stop. I think i will come up with part 2 of this unit soon but for now this is it. 50 pages of ideas, activities, interactive charts and much more all in one place.

Farm animal flashcards

Sort the farm animals and jungle animals

Match the baby animals with their mothers

Spell the words

Favorite farm animal graph

 Life cycle of a chicken

Animal fact cards

 Tree maps

Farm animal puzzles

Number cards

Number puzzles

Addition Game

Patterns

The whole preview!

Click  HERE to download this unit.

 These activities are perfect for small group work. I will soon be sharing some more activities that you can do with young children while teaching them about farm animals.