ISM Spotlight–Making Eric Carle letters

This year I am the luckiest teacher in the world.  I get to teach at the best school ever – International School of Morocco, with some of the best, most creative, teachers ever.  Each time I walk into someone else’s classroom, I get inspired and we just seem to spiral great teaching ideas off of each other.  It’s a wonderful place to teach, and since we are all collaborating, it’s a wonderful place for our kids to learn – a teacher’s dream, right?  I have tried and tried to convince the other teachers to create blogs of their own to spotlight and share some of their amazing ideas, but everyone is super busy.  Instead, they have each agreed to let me spotlight some of their ideas right here on Raki’s Rad Resources.  So, each Friday night, I will be posting an ISM Spotlight. 

This week, we are spotlighting Jen Kadiri, our Pre-K teacher.  Jen teaches the 3 year old class, and does the most amazingly cute, hands-on art projects.  I don’t know how she got brave enough to use paint, collage, and glitter with three year olds, but the results are amazing and the topics she covers amaze me regularly.

Pre-K has been working on recognizing colors and the letters in their first name.  Ms. Kadiri read Eric Carle’s book Brown Bear Brown Bear to the students, and then they created Eric Carle letters for the first letters of their name and the letters of our school – ISM.  She says that she was inspired by a blog post at the Imagination Tree, which she found on Pinterest.  Here’s what they did:

1.)  They painted on tissue paper with paintbrushes, bristle blocks, legos and their fingers.  (Finger painting with 3 year olds – I told you she’s brave!)  After the paper dried, the kids cut the paper into small “collage size” pieces. 

 

2.)  Ms. Kadiri created cutouts of the letters in the students names, and the letters that represent our school – ISM.

 

3.)  The kids glued their collage size pieces all over their letters.

4.)  Ms. Kadiri went back and trimmed off the excess of the tissue paper to great easy to read letters.

 

5.)  The kids spent a lot of time identifying which letters belong to which kids, and then coming up with other words that also had those letters in them.  For example, Robert’s R could also stand for the pet rabbits that the students visit during recess.

 

Update:  Mrs. Kadiri’s class had a lot of extra paper left over, so Mrs. Kadiri turned it into a sorting exercise.  The students sorted all of the paper into color piles.  Then, Mrs. Kadiri drew out the Rooster from   Rooster’s Off to See the World, which they had just read.  With the students telling her what colors they saw in the rooster on the cover, she shaded the right colors into the drawing.  The kids then matched their carefully sorted piles onto the drawing.  Here’s their finished product, it’s quite amazing!

 

Come back next Friday to find out what the other ISM teachers are up to.