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First we cut the fronts off of our boxes, then we drew random straight lines on the back as cutting guides.    When my kids have better dexterity I am sure we could have made the lines more curved, but for now cutting along a straight line was challenge enough.  Then, once we cut all our pieces out, we had fun assembling our puzzle.

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What you will need to make your own Word Slides:

• Thin and long paint chips and larger paint sample pages.
• Razor Blades (to cut the slits for the letter slides)
• Cutting board
• Permanent marker

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Making the Slides in this Learn to Read resource:

I wanted the letter slides to have common beginnings and endings.  We make our beginning blends blue, our endings green, our vowels yellow and random consonants red and purple.  This makes it easy for me to find what I am looking for without a whole lot of digging.

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The beginning blends used the letters: f, t, s, p, b, c, g.   The second blue slide had the letters: l, h, r.  With these cards we can now make the blends: fl, br, cl, gl, sl, pl, th, ch, sh, ph, br, cr, gr, fr, tr, pr.

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The ending blends were: st, er, nt, ll, ck, ed, ly, ng.   These encompassed the majority of endings to words.

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There were also two colors of random consonants to make any blend groups that I missed.

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The kids get to pick their own packet – Better Oats has quite the variety of flavors – and dump the oats and water into their own bowls.

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Sometimes, they talk me into stenciling their initial onto their bowls:

Other times we just decorate our oatmeal with faces or globs of applesauce. Either way, our kids enjoy their oatmeal and I enjoy a cooking activity my preschoolers can for the most part do by themselves!

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This post was sponsored by Better Oats Oatmeal – I can attest to the Blueberry Muffin Flavor. It was yummy!

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How to create your own “What is Missing?” Game:

We used Easter egg tops, but I bet you could use old cups or even sippy cup lids.  Basically, you want something to cover up each item.

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A mix of ten or so small trinkets or items.  We had a figurine, a horse shaped eraser, some candy, a button, loose change, a fake bug, pom-pom, etc.

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Learning opportunities in this Preschool Game:

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We hid each of the trinkets under the egg “lids.  Then I would ask my preschooler to find an item.  Can you remember where we hid the pom-pom?  When she was right we’d switch turns and my daughter would ask me to try and remember where we hid an item.

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Next, we took turns covering our eyes.  After our eyes were covered, the other person would remove one of the items off of the table.  It was the job of the blinded person to guess what item was removed.  When we first started playing my daughter would need clues to help her remember what the item was (ex: it was blue and you could sew it on your clothes).  As we played though, she became very good.

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Then Quirky Kiddo figured it would be best to just wrestle mommy and peak at the contents of the egg lid.  We had a blast and had fun stretching our memories.

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Ingredients needed to make Alphabet Soft Pretzels:

1 Tablespoon of Yeast
1 Tablespoon of Brown Sugar
1 1/4 Cup of Warm Water
– Let it sit for a few min to activate the yeast.
5 Cups of Flour (we used half white, half whole wheat)
1/2 Cup of Sugar
1/2 Teaspoon of Salt
2 Tablespoons of Oil
– Knead together well. The dough will be very stiff for a bread dough. After it has been kneaded and is semi-elastic, let the dough sit for an hour to an hour and a half.
1/2 Cup of Baking Soda
4 Cups of Hot Water

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To make the alphabet soft pretzels:

Grab a portion of the dough. The dough is pretty stiff so roll the portions into thick thumb width logs. Once you have rolled a dozen or so logs, go back to the first and make re-roll the logs so they are thin finger width. Rolling twice allowed the dough to settle and be easier to work with. Once you have the finger width “snakes” as my son liked to call them, form them into the various letters of the alphabet. Dip the letters into the hot baking soda water, set them on a baking sheet. Bake for 8-10 min at 375 degrees.
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Enjoy making and eating your letters!

Ingredients needed for fudge:

• 5 bags of chocolate chips – we used Dark chocolate for the rich flavor and antioxidants!
• 2 Cans sweetened Condensed Milk
• 1 Can evaporated Milk
• 2 tablespoons of butter

Get your big crockpot out, put the chocolate in, turn heat on high. Add the cans of sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk and butter. Stir till all the chips are wet, then watch the chocolate and butter melt. It should take a few hours, and you’ll have to stir the fudge occasionally so it doesn’t burn. If your fudge looks too thick (making peaks) add a bit of milk to it and stir out the clumps.  When the fudge has a thick syrupy consistency, boil your jars and lids to sanitize them, fill the hot jars with the hot fudge. Put the lids on the jars, as the jars of fudge cool the lids will seal – you should hear a ping sound. The fudge lasts forever, assuming you don’t eat it all!
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The best part of making the fudge is cleaning out the bowl afterward!
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Fudge Variations:

• Add 5 peppermint candy sticks to the batch for Chocolate-Peppermint Fudge.
• Add 1 1/2 cup of maraschino cherry juice and half a cup of dry in place of the evaporated milk. If you are really industrious, you can dry the cherries from your marachino cherry jar in your oven (on its lowest setting, turning them occasionally). Dried cherries and this cherry fudge make a great icecream toppings.
• Use milk chocolate and substitute one of the bags of chocolate for toffee bits. Chocolate-toffee topping is delish!
• Add 2 tablespoons of almond extract. It’s a nice Italian variation, great in coffee!

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What you’ll need to make a sock puppet:

• A sock – the more colorful the better!
• Stuffing – or a few cotton balls
• Buttons
• Yarn
• Felt

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What we did was stuff the stuffing into the heel of the sock to create some “puppet ears”.

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For the eyes we cut our circles of felt, then used the button in the center to mimic the “pupil”.  My kids like how googley the eyes seem.  I am a bit concerned that my one year old might chew on the buttons though.  If you have little ones, just use an alternate color of felt to make the eye “center”.

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To make the hair we wrapped the yarn around our fingers and then attached one side of the loops to the puppet, right behind the ears.

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and viola!  You’re done!  Ours took under 15 min to make.  Hopefully you’ll enjoy them for weeks as my kids have! Don’t want to make a silly puppet?  Evgie inspired this little sock, they have quite a few adorable puppets!

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To make your tracing tray:

We used a cookie sheet and I have wheat berries lying about.  We love fresh baked bread!  I poured a cup or two of wheat berries on the cookie tray.  If you don’t have wheat you can use glitter, sprinkles, old spices, dirt, flour, etc.   I just like how easy the wheat berries are to clean up.

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To practice writing words:

We got our word cards out and picked a word.  I began by writing the word at first for my preschooler.  After I wrote it she would trace where I wrote. She picked a new card and we would write the new word.  Then I began giving her her own words to write.  She did a great job!

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After a few cycles of cards on the tracing tray, my gal began writing with a marker on computer paper.  If your kids are anything like mine, they will go through a lot of paper with this method!  I really should laminate a piece of cardboard to save the trees!

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After we had made our papers and let them dry, we cut them in half length-wise, like a hotdog (makes a card more interesting).  We traced my youngest daughter’s hands (sorry no pictures, she fidgets a lot) and cut hand shapes out in bright colored papers.  Glue them together and viola!  You have some springy cards – and some really, really blue hands.

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How we used word cards to start learning words?

We take the word cards and work in small batches of say 4-5 cards.  The kids hold the words up and I’ll read the word to them, then we switch and I get to hold the words and they read them.  Then we mix the cards up and practice again.  We add another 4-5 cards and add them to our mix of words.

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After we had about 15 cards in our stack we began laying the cards on the table face up.  I would say the word and the kids would race to see if they could find it.  Or I would ask one of my preschoolers if they could find the word and if they couldn’t the other kiddo would get a chance.  They loved helping each other.  If they guessed the wrong word I told them what it was and they got another chance (or 3) to find the right word.

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If you have more than one set of cards you can play memory with the words.  Can they find the matching words?  This might be a good way for early readers to work on more complicated words as they aren’t being asked to “read” the word, just to match identical words.  Most sight words are not ones that correlate easily to pictures.  Words that are good for kids to learn to read by sight and not phonetically are words like: the, and, is are, they, etc.  However, if you want to branch out into more complicated words.  You can play the matching game where you have an image (say a scrap of yellow paper) and the word “yellow” and have your kids “match” them.

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Practice creating sentences.  Pick up a word and ask your child to say something using that word.  Give them a few ideas if they get stuck.  Once you have learned a couple dozen words, try arranging the cards into sentences and having your child read the cards.

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Letter clothespins.  I can’t remember where I first saw this but you can have your children learn to sort the words by the letter they begin with or by a letter/sound inside the word.  Ex: Let’s find all the words that begin with “B”, or let’s find all the words that have a “Z” in them.  My son especially enjoyed the hands on interaction of clipping the words into his “letter clothespin”.

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Here is a list of over 100 of the most commonly used words.  You can make the cards yourself using three by five cards, or you can do what we did and use the cards that are included in the sight word game Erudition.  The game comes with nearly 300 words and will keep us busy learning and playing for quite some time!

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List of 100 Most Common Site Words:

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**List was taken From: The Reading Teachers Book of Lists, Third Edition; by Edward Bernard Fry, Ph.D, Jacqueline E. Kress, Ed.D & Dona Lee Fountoukidis, Ed.D. Found on site: Education Watch

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