Commotion in the Ocean

I used sponges & paint to make my bulletin board look like the ocean

I am so excited to begin this blog. I tried keeping up with teaching ideas on my personal blog, but it wasn't happening. Since I do have some things together, I will back track a little before I get started on what's happening currently. To begin, this summer I was blessed with the opportunity to teach Kindergarten and 1st graders in my preschool's summer camp. Our theme was "Commotion in the Ocean." Here is a look at some of the fun things we did:
    A project we completed on the first week was found on Pinterest. The children glued together the scuba diver pieces I had either pre-cut or traced. I believe they cut the goggles and flippers. I designed the writing sheet on Microsoft word using clip art. They turned out really cute, and the children had a lot of fun making them. I used a cool whip container lid to trace for the faces, a full sheet on construction paper for the body, the arms and legs was one piece of construction paper folded in fourths, and the goggles, hands and flippers were free hand. The paper says Scuba Diver: (name) swimming so free, what kind of sea creature(s) do you see? I wrote sea creature names on the board for them to copy if they needed help with the spelling
                                

One of my favorite resources is KidsSoup.com. You do need to pay for a membership, but if you have a class, I promise it is so worth it. My director told me about it, and it does provide many exciting activities. One craft I had the children do was make their own fish. Each child rolled up newspaper into balls and stuffed about half of a small paper bag. They twisted the end and secured it with pipe cleaner. This was their fish shape. Next the children painted their fish however they wanted. They also traced and cut out a fin shape to be folded in half. When their fish was try, the fin was stapled to the top, and I provided them with larger googly eyes to put on their fish face. This is a brief look on how they turned out.
  
The final project I am going to blog about was my favorite. This is where my tweaking comes in. I am a teacher with a tight budget, so I do my best to use our resources at school. I was teaching the children about the octopus, so naturally I decided to have them make one. On the 8 legs you will find tentacles. I can't remember what was originally intended for the craft, but we used beads. To begin, I traced the children's hands without tracing their thumbs. I made sure to close off the top to resemble an octopus head. The children then cut the shape out. Next they colored their octopus with markers. I then instructed them to take the beads and glue them to the arms. We finished off with googly eyes. Check out how adorable they are!

Please ignore the news - just didn't get around to updating the display board yet