The Connett Connection

Check out this post for activities all about the letter J! J is for Jaguar - Use these capital letter outlines to create a jaguar print letter J.  We simply colored the J yellow and then used a q-tip with black paint to make the rosettes. We used pouch tops to fill in our letter J mat!  These letter mats are one of our favorite activities!  We used juice to paint these lowercase letter j pictures.  The kids loved doing this different kind of art.  We used these letter pages as playdough mats.  My son loves using playdough so we try to incorporate it into each week of letter learning.  When we finish with the playdough, we use the same mats to sort capital and lowercase versions of the letter.    These stamping pages are a favorite activity around here!  They make a great fine motor activity and allows for hand-eye coordination practice. [These pages are found here ---> Alphabet Stamping Cente...

I have a struggling reader.  We have been doing a mixture of phonics and sight words, trying to find how she learns best.  It has been trial and error over the past year, but I think I have finally found a method to help my daughter with learning to read with a whole word approach with sight words.  We still learn phonics, right now working through word families to try and grasp CVC words, but right now, she is excelling in learning sight words, so I want to encourage any growth and excitement about reading that I can. I have begun to introduce 4 sight words a week.  I write all four words on the board on Monday then each day we focus on one word.  We start by me saying all four words.  I then have her repeat the words in order.  We do this two or three times each day.  Then we focus on one word and read sentences with that word in them.  I then have her find and circle every time she sees the focus sight word in the sentences. Here ...

Glitter seems to be a vital part of many preschool and young elementary classrooms, and if you are like me, you HATE cleaning up glitter.  I used to dread projects that used glitter as it would get EVERYWHERE.   I would find glitter for weeks... Well, after a few years of glitter wars, I figured out this trick to keep the mess to a complete minimum and the kids still get to have fun with create art with glitter. STEP 1:  Find a shallow container (this photo shows a paper cup, but anything you can easily mix in would work) and fill it with white school glue.  Pour in the glitter and mix it all together.  (In this photo, I put about a teaspoon of glue with a teaspoon of glitter). STEP 2:  Using a q-tip, spread the glitter/glue mixture over the desired area.  STEP 3:  Let dry!  It is that easy! As you can see, the glitter stays shiny.  Students can walk around with their art you do not have to fear the tiny sparkl...

Check out this post for activities all about the letter I! This is our pouch top letter I!  We use these letter mats and simply add pouch tops on the circles to create the letter.  If you do not have pouch tops, mini erasers or other small manipulatives would work as well! I is for ice cream!   We used these capital letter outlines to create letter I ice cream cones!  We colored out letter I to look like an ice cream cone then decorated ice cream scoops to look like they were covered in sprinkles then added a cherry on top! I is for igloo! - We drew a capital letter I on black construction paper and then used blue construction paper blocks to make an igloo! We use these letter mats as playdough mats.  We love using playdough with our school activities! After using the mats for playdough, we look through magazines to find the letter we are learning and sort the letters for capital and lowercase letters. Other Letter I Themed Ide...

So everyone has them.  They lurk in your bathrooms... the empty toilet paper rolls.  Most of the time these little gems end up in the garbage, but did you know they make great used in the classroom or home school with crafts and other activities?  In this post I will outline the ways we have used these paper tubes in our home school. Make centerpieces stand up with toilet paper rolls, like we did with this Thanksgiving turkey.  We used THIS TEMPLATE to decorate and make our turkey centerpiece. We used toilet paper rolls to make this Christmas tree topper.  We used THIS TEMPLATE to create these cute angel to top our Christmas tree! We took our toilet paper tolls and turned them into hearts to make heart stamping paintings for Valentine's Day. We used toilet paper rolls and paper towel rolls to make trees for our rain forest habitat box we made when learning about the rain forest.  This project was on of my daughter's favorite activities! ...

Summer is almost here.  Schools are letting out and kids will be outside more.  Chalk is one of those outside activities that can be fun and can be made to be educational.  Help students reinforce skills they learned in school with these fun outdoor chalk activities. Write numbers on the ground and have your child find that number of objects to place inside each square.  In this photo, my children chose to collect rocks.  They are hard to see against the concrete! Here, the kids looked for objects around the yard that started with each letter.  R is for rocks. G is for grass.  L is for leaf and when I went to snap this picture they were searching for flowers for the letter F. Instead of a worksheet, why not let them do it one the ground?  I made a simple ABC match for my daughter to match capital and lowercase letters. Here, I wrote my sons name on the concrete and had him attempt to trace over the letters.  He is still young...