Kids Wednesday: U is for Umbrella, Uniform, Utensils, Up and Upside Down

There isn't a lot that I could come up with off of the top of my head for the letter U so I was on the hunt for U week but when it rains it pours (laughing because I started with the umbrella..hehe). Seriously though, I found so many things that started with the letter u for us to do.

The first thing that I found for U for Umbrella (print here).  This is a great coloring sheet that they can use to practice writing and have fun coloring.  He enjoyed picking out all of the crazy colors from his markers to color the sections in.

We made a craft with the umbrella where my son cut the umbrella out of the construction paper and laid it out on the paper.  We cut out rain drops from scraps of blue paper and blue paint chips.

He glued it to the big paper and decorated with jewels, beads, feathers, and glitter glue.  He had a blast and we put it on the paper with rain drops and then drew lines around to "make it fancy."  He wrote the U is for Umbrella at the top which is copied the letters from the page we did before so that I didn't have to spell it for him.

We also did uniforms with a worksheet from Teachers Pay Teachers (found here).  There was a cover where he wrote his name and then he did one that he decided was a painter and wrote it into the blanks.

I pulled out the great fireman's uniform that we got at a consignment sale for $8 so that he could play with that for the week.  He wasn't really interested in dressing up at the beginning of the week and I couldn't change his mind but it was out if he wanted to try on a uniform.  I am not sure why he does dress up at school and not at home but I guess I need to have a dress up corner in the house with more options so that he could do it when he wanted.

We also have a bunch of fire department hats that we have gotten from the different activities and my son's favorite activity was hiding things under the hats and making me guess what was under each one.  The hardest one was the markers because he wanted me to guess which color was under which ones and I don't mean red or black.  He picked out toy poodle and mad magenta.

We got some books from different events with fireman, police and more so my son picked out on to the books to do a word search.  He loves the idea of the word search but we are still a little bit away from them being an independent activity so there is a lot of me saying that I see the world police and it is towards the bottom of the page.  I hope that means that he will learn to do them himself when he is a little older.

There are two other dot marker pages for each letter in the Alphabet from Three Dinosaurs here (if you scroll down the page you will see the four options for files with all of the letters in them).  We used these to do patterns.  My son made his own pattern on the first U.

Then I started the pattern and he finished it on the second U.  It was great practice with the letter and with patterns while he traced the U's at the bottom of his first page and then the word umbrella at the bottom of the second.

The United States also starts with the letter U so we picked up our trusty wooden puzzle and put that together.

Another day we pulled out the big floor puzzle and talked about how all the states make up the country of the United States.  He is loving the map but we are having a hard time with states making up a country so this is a great way to re-enforce the parts make up the whole.

And that the United States is one of many countries on the globe is the next step.  I think that he is on the verge of understanding the concept but it seems a lot less concrete then a penny is worth one cent because he can't see all of the country or the United States or the Earth like we were talking about with the planets.

We also did a dot to dot to also do here.  There are two choices so I picked the one that went from 1 to 63 so that my son could follow all of the dots all the way around and make sure he counted.  This is also a great picture to color if your kids like to color when they are done connecting the dots.  One of the preschool teachers that I work with colors the sample and the kids have to try to make theirs the same which is a little different then just letting the kids color whatever they want because with this method they have to stop and pay attention and follow directions.  We did the dot to dot and saved it for later if there was more time to color.

There is also one of the planets that starts with U so we worked in our planet sheet for Uranus so that we can move forward with finishing out book about the planets. (found here).  We also realized that universe started with U so we did this with a double U meaning!

We try to work on different things with our dictionary to incorporate how words and definitions can be found.  I thought that utensil would be a great word to use for our dictionary.  Although everyone uses them, it is a tricky word for little ones so I was hoping to stump my little man.  He didn't know what it meant but we helped him find it and we talked about it right before eating dinner one night.

There are ton of great books with a little bit of looking like Up Above and Down Below by Sue Redding.  This was really great because it showed the the up above ground and the underground (both U words).  There were a ton of fun pictures and great stories.

Another book that looked like it was right up my alley that I hadn't read was Great Day for Up (Bright & Early Books(R)) by Dr. Seuss.  I was shocked that there might be Dr. Seuss book that we didn't own growing up and that I haven't read so I reserved it at the library.  I read it in the fast nature that all Dr. Seuss books but it was super fun and rhyming as all Seuss fan's love.

 
That book reminded me of one of our favorite books Inside Outside Upside Down (Bright & Early Books) by Stan Berenstain so I added that to the list of books to read.  We love this book and enjoy the quick nature and funny traveling story.

I also had the idea that we would watch the movie Up if my son was still sick but he was up and ready for lots of other activities so we didn't get to watch the movie.   We like to do a craft everyday so I found an extra Up craft to go with the movie which we didn't do.  There are a few different ways to do up but we were going to cut out arrows and glued them on the U outlined letter page pointing up.  There is a great U for Umbrella dot marker page (print here) that we also didn't get to so hopefully you will find it helpful!

Do you have any great U activities and crafts?  We had a blast at U week and I hope that you have lots of fun too!!!