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We begin our kindergarten year with Alphabet Bootcamp! We start off reading Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, and we closely look at all of the letters. The kids learn that letters make sounds! Then Clifford stops by with a surprise! He brings magic letter beans (M&M's) in a glass jar. He whispers a magical spell in my ear that the kids repeat, "Boppity boo! Dippity detters! We are ready to learn our letters!" The kids hold their hands out and wiggle their fingers. At the end of the spell, I shake the jar all over the place, shouting, "It's working! It's working!" The kids go wild!!!! I ask Clifford to make them stop shaking, and he does. Shew! Then I place one magic bean in each child's hand. I ask them to put the bean on their tongues and not to bite it. As it melts, I start to wiggle my body. "I feel the magic!!! Do you feel it?! I'm ready to learn letters now!!!" The kids react the same way!  For the first 26 days of school, we practice making a new letter, we draw a picture of something that starts with that letter, and we color Clifford and friends! Each day, we look at our Chicka Chicka anchor chart to find the letter of the day. Once we find it, we add names of students who start with our special letter to our classroom word wall.  Learning names is a big deal for our little ones! At a young age, kids easily connect with concepts when it applies to themselves. At our house and in our classroom, we start with learning the first letters in names of people who are in our families and in our class. We practice comprehension skills and make connections to text by creating our personalized crafts! As always, there's just a few materials needed and a few steps to take to get started with our easy crafts for kids! PRINT!  Cut!  Glue!  We had some letter stickers at home that happened to work well with this craft, but your child could also write with markers. In the past, we have also used foam letter stickers. I cut the pieces out for this three-year-old, but using the glue stick takes coordination for him, and he's also practicing visual spatial skills.  I love the concentration and excitement you see here! Also, do you know how tricky it is for little ones to get stickers off of a page? This activity is PERFECT for fine motor practice! Can you tell that I've had some AMAZING occupational therapists in my life?! They have taught me so much, and I've been fortunate to have them all to myself (okay, and my students have been there, too) for weekly lessons!   Okay, so are you ready to get started with your name activity? Here's a link to get them engaged with the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBDTPHZO-xo If you have the book available, read it next. Read slowly, touching each letter and asking children to point to letters, too. I promise they'll be SO proud of what they know!  MEGA Name Craft Bundle for the Whole Year! DEEPLY Discounted!So here's the thing... name crafts are NOT just for the beginning of the school year! We create name crafts all year long! What's fun is that you can easily differentiate name crafts to keep kiddos challenged. We start with first names, but as the year progresses, we do last names. Some friends even want to try middle names! At the beginning of the year, I write letters for most students, but they write letters themselves later on in the school year. There are just so many skills these activities offer! For a limited amount of time, this MEGA bundle is at an EXTREMELY discounted price! You get 30 crafts for JUST $40! That's just $1.33 per craft! Wahoo! Let's keep these little ones excited about letters all year long!!!  And NOW...Your Free Name Craft Activity! Click the Picture! Chicka Chicka Boom Boom!If you'd be so kind to come back and drop us some feedback, we'd be SO thankful!! Enjoy! 
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In our classroom, we are truly KrAzY for crafting across the curriculum! The kids are just so engaged with the hands-on opportunities, and I truly enjoy creating easy crafts for them that align with our educational content. What I love even more is being able to tie in books and songs! Crafts also encourage students to practice following directions, along with fine motor and spatial awareness skills. Chicka Chicka 123 is an awesome book for introducing numbers! I typically like to hook the kids with a song to start our activities. I kind of look at it like a little advertisement for our lesson! :) In September, once we've been working with calendar routines for just a bit, I introduce counting by tens. We always count the days of school by ones, and once we hit 20 days of school, we start counting by tens. This Chicka Chicka apple tree craft ties in perfectly since Johnny Appleseed's birthday is on the 26th! Step 1: Check out this cute little Chicka Chicka 123 song, found on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIze4BVZblU Step 2: I personally prefer reading to students myself, making extra silly voices and stopping to ask questions and practice comprehension skills as we read together. If you don't own the book, however, here's a link to the story, read online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hen5TlP87m0  Step 3: Once students have heard the song and read the book, they have a clear connection to the craft! In today's craft, we are putting apples on the Chicka Chicka 123 tree in number order as we counted by 10s. Kids get so excited about creating elements of a story, and they don't even realize they are practicing math skills as they create! Although counting by tens is a fairly new task for this three year old, he was able to hunt for the numbers I asked him to find by looking at the tens place. He also learned that those are not letter Oo's all over his tree, but instead zeros. He found out that if the "circle" was next to other numbers, it was a number and not a letter..and not a shape, either. This craft also includes an opportunity for name practice!  Count By Tens with Chicka Chicka 123 Trees in 3 Simple Steps! Print. Cut. Glue.We use Astrobrights paper to print at home, and I just love how the colors pop!    MEGA Math Bundle: Counting and Number ORder Craft Activity for Preschool and Kindergarten KidsIf your students are like mine, they will simply love creating during math class! That's why we've created a Math Bundle, where students put numbers in order in a variety of crafts for the entire school year! For a limited amount of time, our bundle is deeply discounted in our store! If crafts are purchased individually, this product is priced at $73.50. Right now, it is DEEPLY DISCOUNTED at just $20! We really hope we can provide some math time fun for you and the kids at an affordable price. If you're doing distance learning, your families will LOVE to have an opportunity to do some educational crafts at home! (During the school building closure in the Spring, I sent home learning bags that included crafts. In the parent surveys, parents asked for more easy crafts, telling me how much their kids loved them! :) :) ) Check it out here:  Try It Out! Here's Your FREE DOwnload! Chicka Chicka 123 Counting Craft Activity for Preschool and Kindergarten KidsHave some fun for yourselves! Try out this fun little number order craft as you count by tens with your kiddos! PS We'd LOVE your feedback! Drop a comment below to let us know you're here!  My mission for each school year to have each child in the class identify all 26 letters and sounds. Singing, dancing, and crafting happen to be my favorite ways to teach, and I admit that I get REALLY excited when I have students who enjoy learning with those same elements. Luckily for me, singing, dancing, and crafting to learn information applies well with most kids. :) :) :) For this reason, I have found silly kid songs to go along with each letter of the alphabet! This letter craft pack that we use every week in our classroom contains an easy craft for each letter of the alphabet. The craft connects directly to a silly song (or on occasion, a learning activity). There is a fill-in and a drawing space on each craft that allows for differentiation. The cutting involved with this packet also allows for growth in the area of fine motor throughout the your learning.  As we complete our weekly letter study each day, we sing the kids’ song of the week and build an anchor chart with pictures that start with our special letter. On Friday, we create the correlating craft from this pack. Children refer to the anchor chart to complete the fill-ins on the crafts. They look forward to finding out what our letter craft of the week will be, and they love to copy from the anchor chart! The project is completed in just a few simple steps: For example. with the letter Aa, we sing, "The Ants Go Marching" every day of the week. This year's group had predicted we'd be making ants for our Fun Friday craft, and they were right! :)  Try it out for yourself! Grab Your Letter A Alphabet Craft and Drawing Activity: The ANts Go Marching Download Here: It is always such a shock to see those shiny school supplies staring me in the face for the first time every "Back to School" season. There they were, though, looking right at me, while on vacation, mind you, while doing a Target run (something I hadn't done in months, due to COVID). Once I arrived back at home from vacay, I realized it was time to hit the ground running. It's time to prep for another school year! This year, I am SOOO excited to implement something that's been in the making for far too long! After years of teaching preschool/kindergarten, I have finally created a letter learning resource to best fit the needs of my kids. We have followed a variety of routines in the past, but nothing that quite flowed the way that I wanted it to. I compiled years of teaching one of my biggest passions into one file, and I'm so excited to share it with you! The handwriting sheets are just right for the progression of developing the formation of the letters throughout a week of learning. Suggested activities provide SO much fun while learning each letter, and the kids are excited to find out what each day of school has in store! Oooooo, What's All Included?!Contents for Each Letter: Page 1: Handwriting Directions with suggested youtube links provided AND Suggestions for: -snack -youtube song that correlates with the letter poster -animal research topic -fine motor practice -creating the letters -additional activities Page 2, 3: Letter Poster (color and black and white version) Hang these posters in your classroom for students to refer to throughout the year. With both the Zaner Bloser letters on lines and the pictures that are in the shape of letters, letter identification skills stick! Here's how the the colored version looks in our classroom:  Page 4: Letter Poem (Day 1) Each letter has a silly poem to go along with the poster. Student creates a color code and finds the uppercase and lowercase letters. Student counts how many letters s/he found, and writes numbers on the lines. Practice the poem of the week daily to learn letter sounds. I recommend using the letter sign language with the last line of each poem. (Note that you are to say the letter first in the sentence and the sound last.) As you learn each letter, read the poems that go along with each one daily. Be sure to act them out for fun and engagement! Page 5: Uppercase Letter and Lowercase Letter (Day 2) Student traces letters, and write letters in spaces below. You might use crayons or markers for a extra fun. Page 6: Uppercase Letter (Day 3) Student traces, writes, and draws a picture that corresponds with the uppercase letter on the poster. Page 7: Lowercase Letter (Day 4) Student traces, writes, and draws a picture that corresponds with the lowercase letter on the poster. Page 8: Uppercase and Lowercase Letters (Day 5) Student traces, writes, and draws pictures or writes words that begin with the letter. Catch a glimpse of one week of worksheets here:  Another component of the file includes an overall letter learning record sheet...kids LOVE this!! Students keep this sheet, which is copied on card stock, in their folders. Every fun Friday, we color the letter (with markers...ooooo!) we have studied all week because we are now EXPERTS! During their free time, students are encouraged to go back and say the poem for each letter they have learned. This folder travels back and forth between school and home, so families get to practice with their children at home, too. Full color and black and white posters are available for each letter. We have our letter line hanging in our classroom for daily review of the poems that we have learned. I admit...the letter poems are my favorite! It's such a fun way to interact and connect with the kids in a silly way, all while learning letters and sounds!  Once You've Tried It, We Know You and Your Kids Will Be Hooked! Get the Complete Download Here, Deeply Discounted at More Than 50% Off, Exclusively For Krazy for Kindyland Customers! |
AuthorHi, and welcome to Krazy for Kindyland, Kindergarten Arts and Crafts! I'm a mom of three and a primary teacher since 2006. We are on a mission to reach all little learners, providing them with engaging, hands-on learning opportunities to practice spatial awareness skills while learning across the curriculum. Here on the blog, we share differentiated lesson ideas that allow for teacher choice while incorporating crafting and writing into math activities, letter learning, science lessons, social studies topics, character education, and reading comprehension. Our crafts include consistent layouts and are easy for students to understand and follow directions. They are low prep, saving the precious time you need with your students! Fun fact: our customers often note that our products are GREAT for subs! They focus directly on learning content and are easy arts and crafts for kindergarten! 
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