Kid Wednesday: Y for Yo-Yo, Yellow, and Yarn

Who knew that so many words started with Y but we have a ton of them.  Yellow, yarn, yes, yogurt, yucky, yummy, Yo-Yo and Yak to start the list.  I can't remember all of the books that we read with Y week but here were some of our favorites:

Farmer Brown Shears His Sheep: A Yarn About Wool by Teri Sloat

Yes Day! by Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Yes by Jez Alborough (No, David! by David Shannon for opposites)

I thought the book was a little strange but my son loved it!!!  

Make sure you read it first because there aren't that 

many words so it had to be narrated.

I Dare You Not to Yawn, by Helene Boudreau

Yoko, by Rosemary Wells (or any of them in the series)

Little Blue and Little Yellow, by Leo Lionni

Here were some others that we didn't get to read but were on the list.  I hope that you get to check out a few more then we got it.

Extra Yarn, by Mac Barnett

 Yawn, by Nick Sharratt & Sally Symes

The Big Yawn, by Keith Faulkner

Yo! Yes?, by Chris Raschka

At home, we made a yellow yarn ball which was easy and my son carried it around for at least a week so I guess we might have to use some of the other yarn to make a few others for him to play with.  I tried it out first so that I could see how it worked.  My son liked it so much that he carried it in his pocket for the week and I have no idea where it ended up.

We also made a Y's out of yellow yarn scraps on yellow construction paper. If you don't have yellow yarn, any color will do but I actually had three different kinds of yellow yarn so there was lots of scraps to choose from.  At school, they wrote the kids names on the paper and they outlined them in the yarn of their choice.  It is a task to learn the shape of the letters but it also uses a lot of fine motor skills.

My son made a yak out of the letter Y at school which is something that I hadn't seen so it was neat to see it come home.  Hard to come up with crafts for yak so I was glad that I didn't have to do it.

They also made the letter Y with a thicker paper and put hole punches in for the kids to weave the string through.  It just so happened to be yellow string which was another Y word.  It helps younger kids with the fine motor skills and it is good for the older kids to practice patience because they often like to rush through activities.

They did a Y page where they traced the letter Y on the page and circled the Y's in the other section.  It is Y for you which didn't even make my list.  There are tons of these pages out there through lots of different sources on the web.

He did a coloring page at school where the upper and lower case letters are colored different colors so that they reveal the shape of the letter Y.  These are always popular.

My favorite thing was they put pictures of things around the room and the kids needed to use the yard stick to measure them.  I was working in the class on this day so I got to work with all of the kids to make their measurements.  They worked in pairs and one held the yard stick and one read the numbers.  It was fun to see them learn to use the yard stick and even more interesting to see some of them write the numbers.  It seems that numbers are something that aren't worked into the lesson plans very often so it took a little more thought to write them correctly.

There are so many ways to learn your letters and numbers but making them fun through different art work is always fun!  I hope that you find lots of Y fun!