Letter E: Alphabet Activities for Kids

Posted in activities for kids, alphabet activities by Rosemary Lynn

Letter E: Alphabet Activities for Kids at RoamingRosie.com

Welcome to Letter E Day!

If you haven’t read the Introduction to the Alphabet Activities, you should start there.

Don’t forget to check out the Letter E: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids, too!

Letter Sorting: E is for Easter Eggs {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

For our letter sorting activity, I cut out two egg shapes and added some paper patterns that made them look like Easter eggs.

E is for Electric Eels {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

For our next Letter E project, I cut out the letter for Eel in squiggly lines that were supposed to represent the animal.

Then my daughter glued them on the water-colored paper and drizzled on some glow-in-the-dark paint.

The glowing version didn’t photograph well, but it was a big hit in person.

E is for Elephants {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

We made some elephants with grey paint.

My daughter dipped her hands in the paint, then made hand prints on paper.

While the paint was still wet, we added googly eyes and a paper oval ear.

E is for Eyes {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

This is one of the worksheets I made that’s available on my Letter E: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids post.

We spread glue all over the letters and added googly eyes.

E is for Earth {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

Our next project was a coffee filter craft: E is for Earth.

The coffee filters were pretty big, so I cut it to fit the construction paper. Then I outlined some shapes in green to roughly represent the continents.

Next, my daughter and I colored the continents and water with washable markers. I helped a little because she hadn’t filled them all in completely and it looks best with a lot of color.

We took a spray bottle filled with water and squirted the coffee filter. Make sure you have something underneath it {like newspaper} to soak up any colors that bleed through. Don’t be afraid to squirt a lot of water of it, so that the colors will run.

Once it dried, we glued it to a piece of black construction paper with glitter to represent outer space and stars.

E is for Electric Eggs Hunt {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

My girls LOVED this. And it’s very easy to do.

To set up an Electric Egg Hunt {which is also a great Easter activity}, you put bracelet-sized glow sticks inside of plastic Easter eggs. Then hide them around the room and turn off the lights.

Below you can see my girls finding all the eggs. One used a basket and the other just made a pile.

We hid them over and over again, so the activity lasted for quite awhile.

And has been requested many times since.

E is for Electric Eggs Hunt {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

E is for Electric Egg Hunt {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

E is for Scrambled Eggs {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

These are scrambled egg Es. I made some scrambled eggs in a pan and added in some cheese. I let it sit near the end of cooking it, so that it had the consistency of an omelet instead of scrambled eggs {stuck together instead of falling apart.}

Then I slid it onto a plate and cut out letter Es with a cookie cutter.

E is for Chocolate Eggs {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

These are really cute.

For these miniature eggs, I melted some white candy melts in a little baggy, snipped off the corner, and squeezed out the chocolate in oval shapes onto waxed paper. Before the chocolate set, I put a yellow M&M on top.

It cools and sets in a few minutes, but they also stay fresh so you can make them days ahead of time, if you want.

E is for Green Eggs {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

And since we also read Green Eggs and Ham for Letter E Day, I added green M&Ms to some of the chocolate eggs. :)

E is for Easy Eclairs {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

These were my take on eclairs. I wanted to bake something, but something that would be really easy to make.

I didn’t post a printable recipe because I just combined a few things to make them. I DID post a step-by-step photo below, though, to help explain it.

We started with some store-bought pie crust dough. You can usually find this in the frozen or refrigerated section of the grocery store. We cut out flower circles with a 2-inch cookie cutter and pressed the small circles of dough into greased mini cupcake pans. After baking them according to the package directions and letting them fully cool, we spooned in some instant vanilla pudding. Once that set, we drizzled chocolate fudge ice cream topping over them.

And to review, a list of the ingredients: pie crust dough, vanilla pudding, fudge ice cream topping.

They might not exactly be eclairs in the traditional sense, but they still tasted pretty good.

E is for Easy Eclairs {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

And here are some of the supplies I’ve mentioned in this post, including glow-in-the-dark paint, googly eyes, plastic eggs, glow sticks for the electric eggs, the cookie cutter set that I used for the scrambled eggs Es and the easy eclairs, and the fudge topping for the eclairs:

I’d love for you to share if you’ve done any of these projects with your little ones!

Follow me on Facebook and Pinterest to see my latest posts.

Have fun!

Roaming Rosie Signature

23Sep2014

DIY Fine Motor Skills Craft for Toddlers with Pipe Cleaners

Posted in activities for kids by Rosemary Lynn

DIY Fine Motor Skills Craft for Toddlers with Pipe Cleaners at RoamingRosie.com

I like to make homemade activities for my girls by recycling things we have around the house.

We use pipe cleaners {or chenille sticks} fairly often, so we’ve always got those on hand. I usually get them at the dollar store.

For this project, I used 4 pipe cleaners and cut them into inch-long pieces with a pair of strong scissors.

Then, the goal was simply to put them into an old spice container.

This is the type of spice container that holds dried herbs, like parsley or oregano. You’ll notice the top has only 6 large holes.

It’s a great way to work on fine motor skills and helps with prewriting skills.

The only drawback to this is that the metal inside the pipe cleaners can be a little sharp. There are a couple of ways around this. One: ignore it. And two: use pliers to curve over the very ends of the metal pieces, making sure that the sticks still fit through the holes in the spice container.

We chose option one.

Really, it’s not terribly sharp and you can insert them without pushing the ends anyway if you manipulate the pieces by holding them on the fuzzy part. Or pushing gently, which is what I showed my girls.

Or, if you’re really worried about it, you could just use pieces of yarn instead.

My favorite part is that all the little pieces fit inside the container, and, thus, it is self-contained and easy to store.

For more kid activities using items around the house, check out:

Practice Measuring with Rice

Painting With Chalk

Our Colorful Backyard: Color Matching Activity for Kids

Blustery Day Water Play

Free Kid Activity: Developing Fine Motor Skills with Crayons

Pretend Play: Makeup

Free Kid Activity: Chalk on Construction Paper

Free Kid Activity: Painting Newspaper

Make Your Own Color Shadows

Dirt Soup: In Contact With Creation

Have fun!

Roaming Rosie Signature

10Sep2014

U is for Up, Underground, and Underwater

Posted in activities for kids, alphabet activities, free worksheets & printables by Rosemary Lynn

U is for Up, Underground, and Underwater {Letter Activities for Kids}

We do a lot of Alphabet Activities in our house.

My girls love to do projects, and I love that they enjoy projects that help them with letter recognition, pre-reading skills, and a whole handful of other useful exercises.

The main problem is that I haven’t gotten around to posting about all of the activities yet. Or all of the worksheets that I’ve made for the girls. But I’m getting to it.

Today, for example, I’m sharing one of the Letter U activities that we did… even though I haven’t yet officially posted ALL of the Letter U activities and worksheets yet. But with summer ending, I wanted to get this one out there. It’s a great way to get the kids outdoors.

I cut two letters from a piece of purple foam and gave a U to each of my girls.

I showed them a letter U worksheet with the words Up, Underground, and Underwater. We talked about what each word meant, then we used the foam letters to demonstrate each concept.

They held the letters over their heads, then buried them in the dirt, and, finally, submerged them in the pool.

It was a lot of fun for them, and certainly memorable.

Here is the free printable PDF of the worksheet I made for this activity: U is for Up Underground and Underwater

{The worksheet is free for personal and classroom use. Please do not sell or redistribute it.}

We colored in the words after we finished swimming. Can’t just put the letters in the pool and not ourselves, right?

I’ll be uploading more worksheets and activities soon!

Roaming Rosie Signature

30Aug2014

Letter B: Alphabet Activities for Kids

Posted in activities for kids, alphabet activities by Rosemary Lynn

Letter B: Alphabet Activities for Kids

Welcome to Letter B Day!

If you haven’t read the Introduction to the Alphabet Activities, you should start there.

And don’t forget to check out the Letter B: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids, too!

Letter Sorting: B is for Beach Balls {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

For our letter sorting activity, I made paper beach balls and cut out the capital and lowercase Bs into the shape of water drops.

The balls were made from 2 circles that I cut like a pizza, and we glued the triangles down in the shape of a ball first, before adding the letters.

B is for Bubble Painting {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

The Bubble Painting was an outdoor activity.

I added a few drops of liquid food coloring to some cheap containers of bubbles that I picked up at the dollar store.

Then we blew the bubbles onto sheets of white paper.

Most of the bubbles popped on their own, and a few we popped with our fingers, but – either way – I recommend wearing old clothes for this activity. You may manage to keep it off the clothing, but if you don’t, the food coloring will stain.

B is for Bear and Bison Finger Puppets {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

My daughter had some fun coloring the animals blue (for B Day) and we played with them as finger puppets for awhile.

When she was no longer interested in them as puppets, we cut off the finger cuff and glued them to some blue paper so we could add it into our Alphabet Activities Binder.

You can find the printout here: Bison Finger Puppet and Black Bear Finger Puppet.

B is for Blue Bowling {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

We did a bowling activity with a blue ball (one of those you find in the big bins at Walmart or Target for a buck or two) and some homemade blue bowling pins.

To make the bowling pins, I added some blue paint and a few drops of water to the inside of used water bottles. I replaced the lid and shook them to disperse the paint. Then I let them dry overnight with the lids off.

B is for Blue Bowtie Noodles with Broccoli {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

Okay, I know the noodles look green in the picture. There was just something wrong with the lighting in the kitchen and I couldn’t figure out how to edit the photo at the time to adjust the coloring – but I swear they were blue in person!

Anyway, my girls LOVE “Butterfly” noodles. My oldest has been calling bow tie (farfalle) pasta “butterflies” ever since she started talking, so it seemed natural to make them for Letter B Day.

I added some broccoli in florets, instead of cut up, because my kids like them that way. The noodles themselves have a basic sauce of a little milk, butter, and Parmesan cheese.

To make the pasta blue, add some liquid blue food coloring to the water while the noodles are cooking. When they’re done, rinse them with water in the strainer to get rid of any extra dye.

B is for Blueberry Muffins {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

You know what else B is for? B is for Baking!

So….. we baked. It looks like a lot, but only the banana bread was made from scratch (and it doesn’t take very long, either.)

These muffins were from a box mix. Maybe not the healthiest thing to eat, but easy.

And we made mini muffins, as they’re friendlier for small hands.

B is for Banana Bread {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

The picture’s a little dark, but trust me – the banana bread is amazing!

And my daughter loved making it with me.

And eating it.

Click to get the recipe: Chocolate Chip Cinnamon Banana Bread

B is for Banana Split {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

Okay, okay… at this point we’re getting a little food-heavy in this post. I know. I couldn’t help it. :)

Anyway, the Banana Split was made with a scoop of each flavor of a Neapolitan ice cream, some whipped cream, chocolate syrup, sprinkles, and a cherry. Plus, of course, some banana.

We shared it, though: this big bowl of ice cream wasn’t meant to be consumed by a single child. Talk about sugar rush!

And here are some of the supplies I’ve mentioned in this post, including the food coloring and muffin mix:

I’d love for you to share if you’ve done any of these projects with your little ones!

Follow me on Facebook and Pinterest to see my latest posts.

Have fun!

Roaming Rosie Signature

24Aug2014

Lemon Scented Play Dough

Posted in activities for kids by Rosemary Lynn

Lemon Scented Play Dough

I came up with this recipe because my 4yo was asking to make play dough and I’d just found an extra lemon hanging out in our kitchen.

So: lemon scented play dough.

Because scented sensory play is fun for everyone, including moms.

Seriously. I love playing with this stuff.

Lemon Scented Play Dough

Anyway, the ingredients are pretty basic.

And it’s easy to put together – you just throw everything in a pot:

Lemon Scented Play Dough

Then you keep stirring it over medium heat until it looks like this:

Lemon Scented Play Dough

And then you knead it to make it smooth.

As you can see in the blurry photo below, my daughter was already grabbing pieces of it to play with before I had a chance to knead it. :)

Just be careful, because it will be hot. I kinda like digging my hands into the warm dough, tho.

Lemon Scented Play Dough

My girls like to roll it out and cut out shapes with cookie cutters, or cut it using a small angled spatula.

Here are a few pics of them playing with the deliciously scented dough:

Lemon Scented Play Dough

Oh – and playing with it on their easy-to-clean Jake placemats, of course!

Lemon Scented Play Dough

Lemon Scented Play Dough

Ingredients:

1 cup lemon juice (or water added to squeezed lemon juice to equal 1 cup)
1 cup flour
1/4 cup salt
Zest from one lemon
1 Tbsp. vegetable oil
2 tsp. cream of tarter
1 tsp. lemon extract
Yellow food coloring

Begin by zesting and juicing one lemon.

Squeeze the juice of the lemon into a glass measuring cup. If it is less than one cup, add water until it reaches the 1 cup line.

Mix all ingredients in a medium sauce pan, adding enough food coloring to reach your desired color.

Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture comes together into a ball.

Remove from heat and knead until smooth.

Store covered. Will keep for about two weeks.

[Note: even though all of the ingredients are technically edible, please don’t let your kids ingest this. Also, if your child is going to help with the kneading, please remember that the dough will still be hot when you first remove it from the pan. If stored in a sealed container, this will last many months.]

********

To print the free PDF of this recipe, click here:

Lemon Scented Play Dough

Happy Crafting!

Roaming Rosie Signature

22Aug2014

Introduction to the ALPHABET ACTIVITIES for Kids {Start Here}

Posted in activities for kids, alphabet activities, free worksheets & printables by Rosemary Lynn

Welcome to my Alphabet Activities section!

My kids and I have been practicing the alphabet through Letter Days, exploring one letter a day through food, games, activities, and worksheets.

I originally began posting about them on Squidoo (which is now HubPages), and posted about half of the alphabet there. But that site keeps changing their format, so it’s just easier for me to redo everything here, to start from scratch. Besides, I’ve created new worksheets and edited the format of the old worksheets to make printing easier. Not only that, there’s new stuff here you won’t find there – which is why I didn’t include the links to the old articles.

For each letter, I’ll be posting about activities and recipe ideas and also a list of all the free worksheets I’ve made. The worksheets posted below are all in PDF format and are free for home and classroom use – so enjoy!

What is a Letter Day?

I would usually spend one full day doing projects on a letter, or spread it out over a few days. Although even if we did just one Letter Day, we’d still continue discussing that letter for the next couple of days.

To begin each Letter Day, we glue a letter into our alphabet binder. We have two binders that are quite full, with all of the paper activities separated by A-Z dividers.

I almost always do at least two construction paper crafts that include making a letter into something (an H into a horse or a Q into a queen, for example) and a letter sorting activity where my girls need to separate capital from lowercase letters onto two shapes.

I do cut the paper down, though, before we do the projects. I make them 8.5″ by 11″ and then use a 3 hole punch after we’re done to help them fit in the binder.

I used to cut out the construction paper pieces ahead of time, too, and just let my girls glue them on and sort the pieces however they liked. My girls are older now, though, so they can cut more of the pieces themselves. It’s up to you how you’d like to do it, depending on the age of your children.

We also do worksheets that include tracing letters, tracing lines, mazes, color matching, letter searches, and much more.

Sometimes we do a traditional craft indoors, sometimes we run around outside and dig in the dirt. And we pretty much always cook and/or bake something.

But whatever game we play or whatever food we eat, we always talk about the letters. If we’re eating gnocchi because it’s Letter G day, we take the time to find the letter G on the gnocchi package.

We usually do collages, too. But not always, so I don’t plan on including them in each post. When we started, my daughter wasn’t able to cut out shapes yet, so I spent some time cutting pictures out of magazines after she went to bed.

The finished collages looked like this:

We used apples, angels, artichokes, and an accordion for letter A; a bison, butterflies, babies, and bells for letter B; and cars, camera, cherries, and cats for letter C. Now that she’s cutting out shapes quite well on her own, though, I’m considering starting the project all over again, but letting her cut out the pictures this time.

Plus, since my girls love being outside and drawing with chalk, we also practice our letters with tracing and coloring in chalk:

Most of these projects use supplies that we have around the house or that are easy to find. Construction paper is a biggie.

Here are some of the things I’ve mentioned in this post, including construction paper, a paper cutter, a 3 hole punch, and page dividers:

But where do I find all of these projects and worksheets that you’ve mentioned?

I’m so glad you asked!

They’ll all be listed right here and under the Alphabet Activities category. I haven’t finished editing all the photos yet, but they’ll be listed here as I post them. Plus, at one point my old computer died and I lost a lot of photos. So now my oldest is a great deal older when than when I started these projects with her, and since we’ve had to redo some of them for the photos (and it’s taken me awhile to get around to posting them) you may notice some age gaps between the photos of my various blog posts. But taking three or so years to post something is just an everyday part of #momlife, right? Right??

Anyway, this is the best page to bookmark (or Pin) if you want to take full advantage of everything, since this is where you’ll find the list to all of the Letter Day activities and worksheets.

… and drum roll please …

The Alphabet Activities and Worksheets

Letter A: Alphabet Activities for Kids

Letter A: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids

Letter B: Alphabet Activities for Kids

Letter B: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids

Letter C: Alphabet Activities for Kids

Letter C: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids

Letter D: Alphabet Activities for Kids

Letter D: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids

Letter E: Alphabet Activities for Kids

Letter E: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids

Letter F: Alphabet Activities for Kids

Letter F: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids

Letter G: Alphabet Activities for Kids

Letter G: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids

Letter H: Alphabet Activities for Kids

Letter H: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids

Letter I: Alphabet Activities for Kids

Letter I: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids

Letter J: Alphabet Activities for Kids

Letter J: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids

Letter K: Alphabet Activities for Kids

Letter K: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids

*more soon*

Follow me on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest to see my latest posts.

Enjoy!

11Aug2014

Painting Birdhouses With The Kids

Posted in activities for kids, books & book reviews, toys & games & gifts by Rosemary Lynn

painting birdhouses

My kids were SO excited about this project.

I hadn’t realized that picking up a couple of $1 wooden birdhouses at the store could make a day so very eventful.

It was pretty awesome.

Anyway, the reason we even went looking for birdhouses was because of this book that was given to us by a neighbor:

This First Discovery book about Birds was something I thought looked kind of fun, but I wasn’t sure how my kids would respond to it.

Surprisingly, it’s been requested over and over again at bedtime.

Even though it’s a learning book and not a story book, both my 4yo and 2yo enjoy reading it.

This is partially because they love all kinds of books where they get to discover things (the 4yo often requests a book that spells out the life cycle of butterflies) but also because of the fun way they allow kids to “discover” the facts about their subject matter.

This series of books includes transparent pages.

The transparent pages are printed with pictures on both sides and “hide” part of the page that’s underneath it. When you turn the page it reveals the hidden image.

My daughter calls these the “puzzle pages.”

And, from looking at the pictures of others in the series on the back cover, she’s already ardently requested that we get the ladybug book.

Thus, a ladybug and a dinosaur book are in a box on the way to my house right now. And I will be buying more in the future.

If you think your kids would love this kind of interactive learning, too, here are a few others in the series for you to view:

Do you own any of these books already? Which are your kids’ favorites? Your favorite?

Roaming Rosie Signature

13Jul2014

Practice Measuring with Rice

Posted in activities for kids by Rosemary Lynn

Pretend Cooking And Practice Measuring With Rice Activity For Kids

This is one of those activities I love: easy to set up, great for learning, and free.

That’s a hard-to-beat combination. :)

Anyway, while busy in the kitchen/laundry room, I set this up for my girls and was amazed at how involved they became. We’ve done similar things with dried pasta, but we hadn’t used rice for anything in awhile.

I put two large, two medium, and two small bowls on an old cookie sheet. I provided two small measuring cups and two measuring spoons, and dumped some rice into the two big bowls. Then I stepped back.

There was measuring, scooping, pouring, touching, and a general sense of busyness.

And silence.

It was so strange. I’m not used to my 2yo and 4yo sitting so quietly together for so long. But they were involved in their project. There wasn’t even any arguing. No “she’s touching me!”

Just concentration.

It didn’t last forever, of course. Eventually the 2-year-old discovered that the rice made a neat sound as it sprinkled out over the tile floor, and so I wasn’t really able to keep and reuse most of the rice as I’d hoped.

But it was worth it.

Roaming Rosie Signature

30Apr2014

Our Easter Resurrection Garden

Posted in activities for kids, holidays by Rosemary Lynn

Easter Resurrection Garden

The Easter Resurrection Garden is a craft that’s been floating around Pinterest for awhile, and this year, I decided to make one with my girls.

They love gardening, and physical, interactive representations of stories are a great teaching tool.

Ever since we made the Garden, my daughter has been talking about it and asking me to tell Jesus’ story every time we to out into the backyard.

Plus, it gave them an opportunity to get their hands dirty. Pretty much an “all win” in my book.

So, here is our version of the Easter Resurrection Garden:

Easter Resurrection Garden

There are a lot of variations of this on the Net, and most of them include grass. We used flowers instead.

That may not make it geographically correct, but it matched our garden.

Anyway, the tools (which you see above) are pretty simple: some sort of large flower pot, a tiny flower pot, a rock, potting soil, and whatever embellishment you’re going to use, be it flowers or grass seed.

Fill your large pot with the soil, dig a bit of a hole to make room for the tiny pot, lay the tiny pot on its side, and cover it with the soil so that only the top of the pot is showing. This represents the cave. Place the rock near the mouth of the cave and add your embellishments.

Easter Resurrection Garden

My oldest daughter added even more flowers to her Resurrection Garden. She wanted some pink in there to go with the purple.

But, no matter how you decorate your garden, the main point is that you can use it to illustrate Jesus’ resurrection by removing the rock to show the empty “cave.”

I suggest reading a few Easter books, too, which is what we did. It was nice to go back and forth from our Garden to the colorful illustrations of the Easter story. Like these:

Have you tried this craft? Please share your stories with us!

Roaming Rosie Signature

3Mar2014

Dr. Seuss Activities for Read Across America Day

Posted in activities for kids, books & book reviews, free worksheets & printables by Rosemary Lynn

Dr. Seuss Activities for Read Across America Day

Yesterday (March 2nd) was national Read Across America Day!

A holiday celebrating my favorite pastime? Whoohoo!

And better yet, I’ve found a way to easily incorporate activities for my kids into this wonderful holiday, via the Dr. Seuss site.

I may have been too distracted yesterday with setting up a new laptop to replace my well-loved laptop that finally died on me, BUT that doesn’t mean I can’t celebrate it today. Or every day, for that matter.

My girls and I read every night, and often during the day, too, but at Seussville.com I found a free downloadable Read Across America activity booklet that gives you ideas for expanding upon the readings of Dr. Seuss books.

How cool is that?

It’s technically a classroom activity guide, but that doesn’t mean you can incorporate the ideas into playtime at home. Some examples include using The Foot Book as inspiration for dancing and different ways to sing based on verses and characters from One Fish Two Fish and Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?

Dr. Seuss Activities for Read Across America Day

There are many more activity ideas and even a printable certificate for the kiddos. So check out the Read Across America activity booklet and let me know what you and your kids liked best!

Roaming Rosie Signature