Kid Wednesday: D for Daisy and Dinosaur

This week is a D week at school and we started the week with a horrible snow storm so I decided that I would do some quick work so that I would have some fun activities to do while we were stuck inside.

My mom suggested we do a daisy and I said what do you want to do with it?  She went to bed and left me to figure it out.  It was quick work to figure out how to make a daisy educational. My son cut the stems from some scrap paper.  I cut out the yellow circle middles from some other scrap and the leaves from the rest of the green.  The white petals were just regular paper and not construction paper so you can use what you have around.  We attached the stems, centers and leaves first and I wrote the math problem on the center.  My son picked out petals and attached them.  After he was done, he added the numbers and wrote the answer on the leaf.

The finished project had four daisies but I would suggest doing three but my son really wanted four so we worked with the paper that we had.  At the end, we looked up daisy in the dictionary and my mother wrote it at the top and my son wrote it below.

Since the we had the dictionary out, he moved on to playing with his Children's Dictionary.  He had a great time looking up words but mostly in the Z section which was last week's letter.  Then, he looked in the back at the map of the United States and the country flags (he liked Japan and shared it with everyone at dinner). He had to move grandpa's phone out of the way because he was sitting at grandpa's spot at the table.

He circled the upper case and lower case D's on the paper and then counted them and wrote the number on the paper.  It was great practice because he is still working on 3's and S's and stopping to think which ones he wants to use.  This page was one in the big book of different activities including this and some more we did below (found here).

When he was ready for another activity, we made a D book.  He cut up all of the paper to match the pictures and the words.  He was really excited to cut and glue all of the pictures on and got sad that there was one word and one picture that didn't have a match.  He put them on the page and wrote the word on the one and drew a picture on another one.  If you want to download your own, click here to download.

He was excited to put it all together and staple it.  We have a little stapler which he likes to use because it is his size and it has colored staples.  We ran out when he was stapling and he picked green staples so he was even more excited to be able to mix up his colors.

We did another coloring activity where my son colored the letter D per the directions.  The spaces with D were colored in blue and the other letters were colored in red.  It made for a pretty picture. Also included in the big packet of activities found here.

The next day we did a D shaped dinosaur.  I decided to work with some different sticky medias because we are always using the glue stick and not using other things like white glue and tape.  I tried to have my son make a collage which he ended up looking more at the different things that he wanted out of the different magazines so he got distracted.  We got back on track after a little bit and he taped the spikes and feet on and then decided that he wanted to write that it was a T-Rex and different D words on the dinosaur so it was our creative dinosaur.  After he was all done, he added some glitter glue and let it dry.

We did some other activities where you had to pick out the D pictures on the sheet.  There was one where you had to write the D on the picture and others that you had to circle the picture.  He had some fun with doing those but there were some pictures that took a debate about what there were plate versus dish.  It is also in the big packet of information found here.

There was a quick activity of sorting the D words and non-D words into the different columns.  This barely gave me enough time to pull out the next activity that we were working on but it is nice one because you can do it more than once if you want.  This is also found in the large activity packet here.

There was another D sheet that we used on a previous letter where my son traced it and then outlined it in glitter glue but this time he only wanted to trace it so that is all he did.  This and other letters can be found on First School's website.  There isn't a way to link to it without linking directly to pdf but here is the page with all of the letters.

There is one other fun one that I have planned for later in the week which is the B and D dice.  My son loves the dice so I am going to save this for when we have a friend over to play who also likes to play games.  Of course, there are a few friends coming who like to play games so we will see when this one comes out and it might be more than once!  You can download it here and have all the fun of graphing letters too!

Want to sort D's and B's with a little bit of snowman help?  Here is a sheet that is perfect!

There is an alphabet board game that you can print out and have the kids color so that you can play a fun game that they had a hand in making.  Feel free to download it here.

We are also reading a few books for D week.  Since I did a dinosaur activity, I figured that it would be a good dinosaur book, Oh, Say Can You Say Di-no-saur? (Cat in the Hat's Learning Library) by Bonnie Worth.

They were going to do a dog activity so we decided to read Go, Dog. Go! (I Can Read It All By Myself Beginner Books) by P.D. Eastman.  Both of them are Dr. Seuss book so even better to celebrate Dr. Seuss' birthday month with more of his books.

We also got another new book for my son's birthday which we have only read once so it seemed like a good one to read again.  Chick-o-Saurus Rex by Lenore Jennewein and Daniel Jennewein was a fun book about a very special dinosaur.

There was another one that we read before which would be fun to incorporate in to bring in the math ideas and is about dinosaurs.  There are plenty of other D books that you could read because it only takes a little stretching of most of the titles or characters to link them to the letter D!!! Even though Clifford starts with the letter C, he is the big red Dog and you could bring him in too if that is one of your kids favorites.

There are so many cute activities out there on pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers (remember there are tons of free activities and you don't have to be a teacher just sign up for an account).  I know that I downloaded a bunch and printed a few because I didn't know how much time I would have to work this week because of snow delays.  We did get some done on Monday since our other activities were cancelled because of the snow.  We are going to do a few different activities through the week after school or in the morning before we leave. Hope you have fun learning D week!