Most of my "good ideas" come to me in the shower, they always have and I pray they will continue to. So I was a little surprised when this one came to me before dozing off to sleep because it is one of my better intro to the letter ideas.
Since this week is W the worm, with the theme of weather, and the focus being spring, I thought what would be more appropriate than to go diggin to find the letter W the Worm. Today we are using this sensory tub to introduce our new vocab words that are written on paper in the shape of worms, with other Ww's hiding around. We used W foam letters, pipe cleaners in the shape of W, and gummy worms in various sizes.
The materials needed for this Diggin for W the Worm are......
A bag of potting soil
A deep container
(We had to dump out the legos, and duck tape a crack
so we could use this one.)
The worm words (I had a thick, textured paper I was saving...it worked great!)
The wWw. (My good 'ol foam letters, and the laminated W from the activity book.)
Wiggly gummy worms
( Some are full size and some I cut up in pieces, so that we could put them on the dotted W for each worm word. At first I was a little nervous when we couldn't find the small pieces right away because the sticks, rocks and other great pieces of debris from the potting soil were fooling us. But it worked out great!!! River had such a great time sorting through the soil trying to find all the worms attempting to find out to what color the worm was after scrapping off the dirt.)
He loved digging around finding all the W's
As River was digging around he said, "Look Mom, I can make X the Fox!" A little while later he said, "Look I made L the Lizard". I loved that he was able to make those connections by the various ways he ways moving the dirt around. I then showed him how easy it is to make W the Worm. (Digging around in the dirt is so great for all ages, there is something very therapeutic about it. )
Here are some of the worms words we worked on after the diggin was finished.
One with a pipe cleaner W,
and the other with the small gummy worm pieces.
We both had a great time doing this activity! I loved that we speculated about the color of each gummy worm as River scraped off the dirt. After getting all the items out he began to sort everything out into groups. This activity incorporated so many aspects of learning that came forth spontaneously, which made me so happy as a mother and as a teacher!
The books we are reading this week are:
"A Diary of a Worm" by Doreen Cronin
"The Worm Family" by Tony Johnston
"Bob and Otto" by Robert o. Bruel
"Wake Up, It's Spring" by Lisa Campbell Ernst
"The Busy Spring" by Carl Emerson
"The Whole Green World" by Tony Johnston
"Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" by Judi & Ron Barrett
There is a great song by Deborah at Teach Preschool about worms.
We are also singing the Brite Music "Spring, Spring, Spring" song this week.
