Eric Carle Day

So since I haven't posted in quite a long time I have lots to share!! One of my favorite days in my classroom is Eric Carle day. We've done this special celebration the past two years in my class as a closing to our month long study of Eric Carle books. This year I really beefed up our celebration and the kids had a blast. Defintiely going to do it again next year. I got most of my ideas from the Chets Creek Kinder Wiki- you have to check out all their amazing resources!

My favorite part of the day were the super cute t-shirts we made to wear! Our class always get SO many compliments are these awesome shirts that are actually really easy to make. I let the kids do most of the big stuff (with VERY careful supervision) and then I added all the details with puff paint after the base colors dried. I went ahead and washed them at home so I could hand them to the kids ready to wear!

Now for our activites- like I said we had a VERY busy day but it was so fun, and we got a lot of reading, writing, and math done! =) We started the day by reading Pancake, Pancake and doing a lesson about different types of goods and services featured in the book. We also did some sequencing activities and compared the differences between how the boy gets pancakes and how our class normally get them. And then of course we made pancakes!! We made plain, blueberry, and chocolate chip, and graphed our favorites- one guess for what won....yep chocolate chip (can't blame them, that's my favorite too!).

Then we went outside to play some games that went along with our three favorite books. Our first games was a Very Hungry Catepillar Relay. We dividied into two teams with the kids lined up with their team. They then had pass a story telling piece (parts from the story) down the line over/under style (you know over the head, then under legs of the next person, etc.). Honestly the kids had trouble with this because they just couldn't focus very long but we finally got through. When all the pieces were at the end of the line the kids had to work together to put the story in order.



Then we played a relay that went along with Pancake, Pancake. It was pretty basic relay where the kids had to balance a pancake (I have these random plush ones from a math game but you could use just foam or paper cutouts) on a spatula and drop it off on the plate at the end of the row. They then ran back pancakeless and passed the spatula to the next person. This one was really fun and the kids begged to do it several times! Sorry no pictures (guess I was busy corrallign the masses)!

Our last outside game was a Head to Toe relay/obstacle course. In Head to Toe the kids are all imitating animals so that was the inspiration for this game. I set up 5 cones in a line about five feet apart. On each cone was a picture of an animal and a motion (frog- jump, horse- gallop, penguin- waddle, crab-crab  crawl, bunny- hop). The way down the line the kids had to do the indicated motion from one cone to the next, and then once they go to the end they could run back. We had fun with this one, and it was a good indicatior of just how far we've come during the year with following directions! Horray!

Then we went inside for even more fun! We did a listening game with easter eggs to go along with The Very Quiet Cricket. I prepared pairs of eggs with the same type and number of objects inside (whatever I had lying around: jellybeans, push pins, pennies, erasers, etc.) Then I passed out the eggs to the kids, and they had to find their matching pair. It was a quick but fun game! I actually used the eggs several other times in the year to make partners. =)

 We made crabs using pasta noodles, large pompoms, and pipe cleaners to go with A House Hermit Crab (my personal favorite Eric Carle book). The kids were thrilled with these!! Seriously they walked around with them like they were real!

We made 100 legged centipedes and praticed coutning my tens. (We usually do this on the 100th day of school bu we ran out of time this year so it was perfect fit for Eric Carle day!!). It's kind of hard to see from the picture but the kid had to add ten legs on each circle and then count by tens (10 was on the first part of the body, 20 on the next, 30, etc.) 

 We also made two class books. One to go with The Mixed Up Chameleon. The sentence frame was, "I wish I could ________ like a _______." I printed out black and white pictures of the kids which they added their choosen animal details to.  I snuck in a mini-lesson/review of nouns and verbs during this assignment and all the kids projects turned out really cute.

 Our other class book was more for sight word review and went along with Eric Carle's book Have You Seen My Cat? In the story the main character travels the world looking for his cat and proclaiming, "This is not my cat!". Before starting the book we went on our own hunt around the school. I cut out butterflies using a die cut at school out of different scrapbook scraps (two butterflies out of each scrapbook pattern). In the morning my assistants and I went around the school and taped up one of each butterfly pair around the school. Then when we were ready for our hunt I handed out one butterfly to each child and intructed them they had to go searching for their matching butterfly. The kids LOVED this! And they were so cute going around the school asking, "Have you seen my butterfly?" (NOTE: we just stayed in a line and if the people in front saw one that wasn't there's they would just point to it as they passed!). Once we found all our pairs we went back to class and made our class book. The sentence frame was "This is not my butterfly!" The kids had to draw a picture of themselves and design a butterfly that wasn't like theirs. It turned out pretty cute.

 So that was our day! Lots and lots of fun. And the most talked about day all year! What are some of your favorite Eric Carle activities?

Hope you're enjoying your summer time!

Jessie