Nn noodle day- preschool style

I'm was going to say Nn noodle day was fun, but I don't really know. Lou was sick and I had to just send in my materials.  Lou was happy to work with all of them when I got them home.  I'm going to write this as if I was doing it all in the classroom, it's easier that way. 

There were few 'noodle' themed books at our library.  I liked The Story of Noodles by Ying Chang Compestine best, but will keep an eye out for future years. It was long and needed a bit of condensing for a group reading to peeps this young. 

I had paper plates with each of the letters where we've covered to this point, a-n capital and lower case. I set out only a few at a time and changed them frequently. 

Each child had a paper take-out box and set of chopsticks.  The boxes had several cuts of yarn 'noodles.' I called out a few of the children's names and a letter and those kids brought up their noodles to the plate.  

 

I should have gone to a Chinese restaurant and begged for boxes, instead I cut them all out from a pattern available here.  If you copy the image and increase out the size in a word document, it prints out fine.  After 10 boxes, I realized cutting was too much but then I too far in. 

The idea of using chopsticks and yarn noodles was adapted from Let's Go Fly a Kite.  The chopsticks were in my boxes of 'teacher stuff' I store at my in-laws.  I got them years ago for a Chinese new years activity.  I think another teacher picked them up for me because I can not recall where I got them. 

Here are a few things I set out for the kids to work with during arrival time and at the end of the day.  The kids love the balance scale.  I put nuts, noodles, and the weights for the scale out for them.  They do really enjoy working with this.

I made these cards up with n words.  There are just a handful of them.  We used our letter tiles to spell out the words on scrabble trays.  I pulled out only the needed letters so there aren't so many available.   I have set this out in the room a few times since this and the kids really haven't used it much.  Lou is happy to work with it. This idea is from Our Country Road. 

This one was fun.  You roll the dice and add that many meatballs to the spaghetti plate.  I added chopsticks and a Oriental style cloth to to tie it in with the other activities.  Those brown pom poms could be some Chinese meat I suppose.

 

This idea was adapted from totally tots.   Luke enjoyed working with this one, and then he dumped all the meatballs on and pretended to eat them.  Just as good. 

This nut sorting activity is from  Counting Coconuts.  I've had the cards since last year and finally got a chance to use them.  If there were any nut allergies in the school, obviously I wouldn't have been able to use this. 

I used random jars; I didn't have enough wooden bowls.

Here was the craft for the day, which Lou had to work on at home.  They glued dyed noodles onto a paper titled 'noodle art.'    

I had this noodle activity ready, but they didn't need it.  The kids were each given small bowls of dry noodles and a recording sheet.  This is from mailbox magazine preschool August/September 2000. 

And these next two items were from my teaching partners Nn day and I liked them so much I wanted to share.  

Phone number bingo:  Each child's phone number was typed out for them.  Numbers were called out and they covered up the numbers.  When the child had a 'bingo,' then they read off their phone number. 

She also had the kids circle number nines in the newspaper.  There are a lot of nines on all the add pages I noticed.  Cars and grocery mostly.

I used a lot of ideas this week that I gathered online, mostly from pinterest.  I can't imagine doing this job without the internet!  I know I didn't use online resources very much my first few years, but I had teacher plan books at least.