Name Cheers in Preschool

Have you ever had anything to cheer about with your preschoolers?   Each spring I like to have my Little People make Name Cheer books.   These are accordian-type books that the kids make which have a page for each letter of their name.  (I originally got this idea from a Mailbox magazine.) Once the kids make their book and practice a bit, they take turns standing up in front of the class with pompoms and leading the class in their Name Cheer, with the "audience" cheering the each letter back:

"Give me a B!"  (B!)
"Give me an O"  (O!)
"Give me a B!"  (B!) 
 "What does that spell?"  (Bob!).  They love it, and it helps everyone involved with recognizing and naming letters, not to mention helping the cheer leaders learn how to spell their own names.

However, what they love even more is using and getting to keep their own pom poms.  Last year I just borrowed a coteacher's pom poms for Name Cheers, but this year I wanted to let everyone take a pom pom home so they could do their cheer for their family.  So I decided to make some.

After searching on Pinterest I found this Pom Pom tutorial:

Source: marthastewart.com via Julie on Pinterest

I basically followed the instructions from the link above, and found the directions very easy to follow. Therefore, I will just point you to that link for the basic pom pom steps instead of trying to replicate what is already well-explained.

I will say that I seriously overestimated the amount of tissue paper that I needed for 25 pom poms.  To keep you from doing the same, I will tell you that it worked out that it took approximately one standard sheet of tissue paper for each pompom.  However, since I used more than one color on each pom pom,  I cut several different-colored sheets of tissue paper at a time and mixed up the colors as I went to make multi-colored pom poms.  Like this:

One difference that I made from the original tutorial was that I did not wrap my cut tissue paper strips around a dowel.    I made this switch largely for cost purposes, but also because the combination of Little People and dowels in my mind just makes me think of poking.  And who needs poking with the Little People?

Instead of a dowel I used toilet paper rolls.  One roll was too short of a handle, so I put two rolls together.

Fold one of the toilet paper rolls in in half lengthwise (like a hot dog).



Place the folded tube inside the non-folded one a few inches.

Then fold the unfolded one so that the folds line up with the already-folded inside tube: (I know, there are a lot of "folds" in that sentence - sorry.)

Hold them together tightly and wrap well with masking tape.  This will become your handle onto which you tape the tissue paper.

Using this as a handle, follow the instructions in the link as Martha suggests.

When I was done, I had a wonderful pile of pom poms for the Little People.

As a side note, I also made one pom pom out of my favorite new material, plastic tablecloths.

While it turned out cute, I still decided that tissue paper was the most cost-efficient choice for the large quantity I was making.

When all of our Name Cheer books were made, I put them all on our bulletin board with the available pom poms.  After the kids practiced saying the letters in their name, they got to choose the pom pom that they wanted and used it to lead their Name Cheer in front of the class.  Then they got to take the book and pom pom home and (hopefully) do their Name Cheer for their family.

Making the pom poms is definitely something that I would do again.  It was easy, inexpensive, cute, and highly popular with the Little People.  Definitely a keeper.

Fro Pinterest to Real Life

**A note to readers - I have no idea why this post is looking so blockish and cattywampus.  I just know that when I copied some of the texts from my personal blog to this teaching blog, something weird happened in between.  Sorry.

Well, my Pinterest boards and pins are growing and growing.  Lately I've been finding lots of ideas for school, and have been organizing them into categories:  Art Ideas, Alphabet Ideas, etc.  

Apparently I'm not alone in my Pinterest obsession.  Lots of people like to Pin, and once I even saw a blog offering up a challenge for people to show what they actually made from all these ideas they were gleaning (which to me insinuates that lots of people Pin ideas that they never actually get to).

I didn't send in any projects for that challenge, but I have made several things from the ideas I've found. 

Here are some in my classroom:

A height chart:

Pinterest Version

Source: learningandteachingwithpreschoolers.blogspot.com via Julie on Pinterest

My version.  I used this wonderful colored masking tape to mark the height lines, and it turned out really colorful. 

A balloon wreath:

Pinterest Version

Source: blog.catchmyparty.com via Julie on Pinterest

My version.   I made different "Happy Birthday" tags and we put it out whenever someone has a birthday.  Unfortunately, the kids love to pull the balloons out, and I caught someone actually trying to blow one up one day (while it was still attached to the wreath).  They were - unsuccessful.


This project wasn't actually a Pinterest one, but I thought it turned out really cute regardless.  The kids did a pretty good job picking out a color that was close to their skin color.

So, all in all, a good gleaning from my Pinterest boards...plus some other inspiration, as well.

Spiders

I've been having a little spiderweb-making session at home this morning in preparation for school today.  I of course got this idea on Pinterest.  Here is the pin itself, with the link to the instructions:

Source: momendeavors.com via Julie on Pinterest

I thought this was a fun idea, so I decided to include it in this week's "Friendly Spiders" festivities. 

I could see right away that the pretzel webs would need to be preassembled, since I thought it would be tricky to add the webbage without some sort of stability.  (Actually, I really just imagined the scenario of a well-meaning Little Person brushing up against the pretzels while piping on the web and knocking the pretzels awry.  Then I repeated this mental picture in my head 21 times and decided to preassemble them.)

Therefore, I piped out a thick center of white chocolate to the wax paper and then added the pretzels.  I started with six pretzels, but quickly moved to eight.  The chocolate firmed up pretty quickly, and then I could stack them in my containers for the move to school.

In fact, here they are, ready for transport. 

Despite the fact that today is a little cooler, I still intend to shade them in the car and to not tarry on the way, since some strong sunlight could wreak havoc on their Web Stability.

After I got the webs ready, I started on the spiders.  The original website suggested raisins as a possibility as spiders, but I found that I didn't like this option.  Mainly because the raisin on the web didn't really look like a spider.   Well, perhaps like one of those spiders you find in the corner of your garage - dead and all rolled up in a spider ball.  Which was kind of a gross mental image, really.

Instead, I went with chocolate spiders.  And llet me tell you, the next time you're sitting at a church potluck and someone casually comments to you about how easy chocolate spiders are to make, you have my express permission to scoff at them and disagree.  I found them quite hard to make.  Especially when I was had the melted chocolate in the cheap sandwich baggies, and new holes kept opening up in the baggie.  It is truly hard to add only eight legs to a spider's body with three holes of chocolate oozing out.  Because we all know that 3 + 3 + 3 does not equal eight.

The result of the chocolate spider challenge was that I a)changed baggies to one of those heavier Ziploc bags, and b)made larger and larger spiders since they were easier to make anatomically correct.  The final result was spiders much closer to tarantula size, which might be alarming to any Little Person if they were made of anything other than chocolate.

However, I suppose that's the saving feature in all of this.  They're edible and are made largely of chocolate, so how can I go wrong?



As always, I'll let you know how it goes.

Capes

I recently stumbled across a great way to make capes for the Little People.  Of course, I discovered this on Pinterest, because I still can't seem to pull myself away from that site.

Anyway.  Here is how you make super-easy capes for Little People:

1) Buy a man's t-shirt at a yard sale.  I got mine for 25 cents, which I thought was a steal.

2 )Lay the t shirt down on the table, front side down.

 
3) Using scissors, cut from the side seam of the shirt up to the collar.

4)  Stop just as you reach the right and left edge of the collar, as shown:

5) Then open up the shirt as shown, and continue to cut around the collar.

6) Discard the rest of the shirt.  Or recycle it.

Voila!  You then have a very easy and cheap cape.

 7) Take the capes to school and let the Little People love them.

However, in your frenzy of cape-making, don't forget these two small details:  First, you will want to snip the front of the collar of each t-shirt with scissors and add Velcro to fasten the cut collar together.  If you do not, the longish cape can get caught in the wheels of a tricycle and pull on a child's neck, causing no small amount of neck redness - not to mention huge visions of liability issues to swarm before your eyes.

Also, don't skimp on the pink capes.  One is not enough.  In fact, is better not to put them out until you have more than one pink one.  Or perhaps a purple or yellow one, as well.

So there you - easy capes for the Little People.