From The Hive: Uu umbrealla day- preschool style

Another fun day- U u umbrella day! I knew I wanted to use Jan Brett's book, The Umbrella. I printed out some faces of the characters from Jan Brett's website. They are available here.

We used them throughout the story and then for some retelling at the end. The leaf umbrella is just felt sewn together.

I also found a great book if you needed to take this theme up a notch, The Umbrella Queen by Shirin Bridges. Bee and Lou both really liked it but I didn't use it in class. We also checked out Un Brella by Scott Franson. It would be really good if you needed to take this theme down some. It doesn't have many words but it is cute.

I also showed the kiddos these two pictures that I found through Pinterst. I can't get either of them back to an original source though. This is a problem I've had with photography on Pinterst. The kids decided that the little girl was waiting for a bus and the little child was waiting while his mother was shopping.

I couldn't wait to get to this activity. I had tied a class set of raindrops to the edges of an old umbrella. (I poked holes in the umbrella fabric)

Each raindrop had a number of dots drawn on it.

As each child took his turn, cut off the raindrop, counted the dots,

and then stick it on our board under the correct written number.

The kids liked this activity. Our leader ended up holding the umbrella for me so I could help the friends count their dots when needed.

I wanted to have some activity using those umbrella toothpick guys. I wrote all of our phone numbers on a paper covered styrofoam. I picked up the stryofoam at the recycle center. They used to take it, now they don't. But people still drop it off and is sits a long time.

The kids took turns sticking their umbrella in their phone numbers. We are getting better at being able to recognize those special numbers. There were just a few friends left at the end just staring at the board.

Here's another fun activity we did. We used these clothes pins back on dinosaur day and I've been waiting for a time to reuse them. I told the kids we were done talking about the rain, we were ready for the sun to come out. With all the clothespins in place, these did look like suns.

I had the kids work primarily on their own on this, show it to me, and then break it down and clean up their materials. I added an orange dot to show them where to place the number one pin, then they could easily figure out how to place the others in the right spot, but I could have added dots for each pin if they needed that. The kids did amazingly well on this activity. I love to see how much they've learned!

I also threw in this little umbrella rhyme. I read the first line and had the kids help use the rhyme clues to decide the final word, the color. As we figured out the color, we added that umbrella to our flannel board. We reviewed all of the rhyming words and colors throughout the rhyme.