Mitten Week

I was SO excited to start last week's lessons, which were all based on Jan Brett's story of "The Mitten." This has been a favorite book of mine since college and I actually did a mini-unit using it during my student teaching with first graders. I love the fact that Little Bear enjoys the story as much as I do so we were thrilled to do so many fun things with it last week!

We kicked off the week by painting mittens! The girls used their new Do-a-dot paints and went to town covering these mittens. After the paint dried, I cut them out for them. LB chose purple AND pink for her mitten, but the pink didn't show up very well under all that purple ;) I love this "action" shot of her dotting the paint:

Tiny used the teal color and she had a great time seeing how much she could get on her fingers and face :D I helped A LOT with hers and she did a great job!

The finished PURPLE mitten:

The finished TEAL mitten (and teal-faced little girl):

Jan Brett's website is AMAZING to find adorable pictures that go along with her books. We found the copies of the mitten and all the animals on this page of her site. I colored and cut them all out, then laminated them to make them nice and sturdy. The first project for Little Bear was to "sew" the two pieces of mitten together. Not sure why, but we don't own any yarn, so we used twine (or jute) instead. She LOVED lacing up the mitten...she commented the entire time how much fun she was having!

I was super excited about her level of enthusiasm for sewing the mitten, so I introduced the animals to her right away (I had originally planned to wait another day). We acted out the story, even pretending to be "Baba" and "Nicki," losing the mitten and putting each of the animals in the mitten in the correct order. IT WAS SO MUCH FUN! I kid you not, she wanted to do this AT LEAST ten times in a row...each time switching who was "Baba" and who was "Nicki." She preferred to be "Baba" and have me be "Nicki," probably because she thought it was funny that I was running around like a goofball, pretending to play in the snow with the mitten on my hand :) I was very proud of her for being able to retell the story, putting the animals in the mitten in the correct order...which was the whole point of this activity. Oh yes, I'll mention too that she insisted that we call each other "Baba" and "Nicki" for the rest of the day ;)

Next up was some color matching with mittens. I got these cute little mittens from the Preschool Printables site, here. Rather than making them into a file folder game, I just made it like a matching game where LB had to put the pairs together on the table. This was a little boring for her so she decided to make a "mitten train" with them instead.

We played a little game of "mitten toss," stuffing socks inside each mitten to give them a bit more weight. Little Bear had to stand with her feet on the edge of the rug and toss the mittens into the laundry basket. Tiny didn't have to go by the rules...she just had to get her mittens into the laundry basket however she could ;) She was better at retrieving the mittens for us after we tossed them!

We threw in a few other activities this week that didn't go with the mitten theme. Little Bear worked on tracing some alphabet letters, using her ABC Write-a-mat she got for Christmas. It strikes me as a little odd that she used to hold her writing utensil correctly (like back when she was TWO!), but now has reverted to holding it differently, which makes writing and coloring more difficult for her. Oh well...I am trying not to push the issue, but I do try to show her the "right way" each time she begins something like this.

While Big Sis worked on letters, Tiny did some coloring too. She LOVES to get her hands on crayons! I drew a shape and then would ask her to color it in, and for the most part she did it! I think we have a little artist in our future :)

And now for my favorite moment from the week: I gave the girls some counting bears, a silicone muffin container, and a wrapping paper tube while I was making lunch and here is what they were doing:
OH SO FUN!

Thanks for reading :) I hope everyone has a fantastic week!