ABC and 123: A Learning Collaborative: Spring is Here

Friday, April 16, 2010

Spring is Here

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The trees are blooming and the daffodils are pushing up through the ground, here in Michigan. Spring has arrived and we've got LOTS of great activities and projects to share with you!

If you are still working on yours, don't fret! If we get enough submissions we'll do another round up of ideas so keep sending them in. We're also looking for planting and green crafts to feature for Earth Day, we love seeing all the ways you turn recycleables into neat stuff!

Spring Weather & Rainbows:


Little Page Turners made this pretty windmills, perfect for a windy day, like the one in the book by Frank Asch that inspired them.

Mandarin Home Schoolers shared the lessons that welcomed spring in their home, including this Q-tip rainbow. There are also book suggestions, as well as links to the readers and the rainbow math sheet they used. We also liked how they made a chart comparing winter and spring.

There are several great spring themed projects over at Getting Messy with Ms. Jessi! We especially like their group rainbow. You'll definitly want to stop by and see their creative play with flower, rabbit, and red robin crafts too.

Spring Creatures:


This red robin project is made by recycling your cereal boxes. Leah from Almost Unschoolers also shares a book you can use in conjunction with this craft. To continue on with your learning theme, you could also make the delicious looking cream cheese filled phyllo dough robins' nests.

We love these cute Monarch butterflies Ticia at Adventures in Mommydom created out of file folders and tissue paper. While you're there, why don't you also check out the pictures of her kids frolicing in the fields of bluebonnets, beautiful!
Amanda at Fun Handprint Art made these footprint butterflies as part of their March calendar page but notes that it would be a fun spring project even without the calendar.

Mandarin Home Schoolers also did a unit focused on the classic children's book, The Very Hungry Caterpiller. We liked several of the things they did like alphabetizing the words for the foods the caterpillar ate, practicing handwriting with fill in the blank portions of the text, and making flower tops for their cups during snack...too cute! Our favorites were the posters for each stage of the Blue Morpho butterfly life cycle.

Little Page Turners also these adorable bug houses, only it looks like a little fairy may have moved in too!

They also made these little rock frogs, so cute and fun, also a book related craft.

If you don't have any rocks on hand, try these paper plate ones, from A Mommy's Adventures. Can you guess what the eyes are made of?

Spring Flowers:


The Pink and Green Mama has written an article for Babble about printmaking with kids using recycled objects you have around the home.

Our feature writer Erica from Confessions of a Homeschooler, recently made salad spinner flowers.

Maureen at Spell Outloud did this adorable foam flower craft based on the popular book Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert.

Dont' forget to send us your green crafts, like these pop out flowers found on No Time for Flash Cards, we love this creative way to reuse toilet paper rolls.

Nature:


Color flowers with Teach Mama and then

Head outdoors and do their easy and exciting backyard fragrance experiment.

Snack Time:

After looking at all those projects, are you hungry yet?

Here are Pati's, from A Crafty Escape, spring cookies. A special treat for snack time☺ We also like her scrappy solution and green idea, for using up all those free promotional magnets you get in the mail. Another option would be to have your kids create small works of art work and use those to cover them.

But if you're looking for something a little healthier, how about the edible insects at Little Page Turners? Pretty stinkin' cute, huh? If you noticed that Christianne is in this post several times, it's because she's awesome! If you haven't been over there yet, what are you waiting for? You won't regret it!

7 comments:

  1. What a huge collection of fun ideas. Anne Hope would love to put together a Fairy (Bug) House That is a unique idea.
    Thanks for putting these all together!

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  2. I really love your new layout for the site. It looks so clean and chic.

    The blog hop linky days....are there specific days to come link up like Tuesdays? Or is it just when you announce to link up. Just to be prepared!

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  3. Thank you for featuring our Spring Cookies! We love Spring around here :)

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  4. You made my day! Thank you for the feature, and for putting together such a great selection of fun crafts! Love the new layout, btw.

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  5. Thank you for featuring our paper plate frog!!! I loved seeing all of the other wonderful ideas. I can't wait to try some off them out.

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  6. Wow! So many great activities! Like the new look too :)

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