Making up for no school on Monday

I decided that I needed to get Robbie writing again. His teach suggested having him write a story - but I still think that's a little beyond him. So, I decided we would make a book and have him fill in his own ideas. The easiest way to do this was by mimicking Brown Bear, Brown Bear.

I printed up a few pages that had a window, some lines and the words "I see a" and "looking at me" with a space for him to fill in what he sees. I then cut out a some textures from magazines (I started with trying to let the kids find the textures but quickly realized it was a bit of a struggle for them to grasp what I was asking as they were focused on cutting out entire pictures - which is okay, just not for this project). I made sure not to make the pieces any specific shapes because I still wanted them to cut them to whatever they wanted.

He picked an animal and cut each body part out of the various color pieces. For Lyssie, I adapted the project by having her choose and animal and cutting the body parts out herself. She glued them on putting each piece in the right place (for example, legs below the body, head above the body). She insisted on 6 legs - I needed to allow for some creativity!

Robbie had me glue his pieces on for him as he made them a bit small and got frustrated that his little red spots on his tree frog weren't gluing down with the color side facing up.

Finally, I had Lyssie tell me the color and name of her animal and I wrote it for her (she also wrote it in her own language). I had Robbie write his on his how. This is just the first page of their book. We will continue to make these to help him with his writing. He's concentrating on getting small letters to stay below the middle line and his big letters to touch the top and bottom lines.

Both kids enjoyed the project and I enjoyed watching them create their animals. I love that once we had the pieces, we each had a different idea of how they would go together. I did the pig to demonstrate what we were doing. Robbie glued the pig together.