Friday, September 9, 2011

The Carrot Seed



Our Preschool book this week was The Carrot Seed. There's something about the determination of the little boy in this book that reminds me so much of Peanut's personality (maybe that's why I love this book so much.)

The first thing we had to do of course was harvest some of our carrots. We had a pretty successful crop this year and the kids really had fun pulling them up and seeing all the different shapes and sizes.


They all played a roll and cover game that I made to match our theme.  To play this, they roll a die, count the dots, and cover that number of squares. (We just used orange beads for this.) The first one to cover their whole page wins.  You could also use two dice and have them add them to make it a little harder. You can print the game here.


I wrote a number in the corner of this Play-doh mat, and Peanut put the correct number of carrots into the wheelbarrow. It looks a little different than the one in this picture, but if you want a printable for this you can get it here.

Here she is matching an uppercase carrot to the right lowercase wheelbarrow. Again, these won't look like the ones in the picture, but you can download the wheelbarrows here, and the carrots here.

These little carrots I just cut out of construction paper and laminated to use for a number of different activities. I cut slits in a brown box so she could "plant" her carrots in rows. For this particular activity, I put one carrot at the beginning of each row with a shape on it, and she put the others with that same shape in it's correct row.

I created this shape and color viewer for Peanut by laminating two printouts I made back to back. On one side it says "A carrot is shaped like a triangle. Can you find more triangles?" Flip it over and it says "A carrot is orange. Can you find more things that are orange?" Print the shape side here, and the color side here.

The kids all tried out being wheelbarrows.


Peanut dipped cut carrots in paint and stamped them on her paper to fill her carrot picture in.


She practiced tracing triangles. You can print this triangle tracer out here.


She also practiced cutting triangles.

We used one of the triangles she cut to make a carrot for our book cut-out this week. We added a top to the carrot and glued it on along with a teeny tiny carrot seed.


This was my first time making printables to go along with our theme. I never intended to make them available to the public, so I had to change some of the images in order to share them. I figured out how to share what I could, but the others have copyrighted images on them, so I couldn't share those. Enjoy!

Other sites with great ideas for The Carrot Seed:

Linking To:


Classified: MomShibley Smiles

18 comments:

  1. What an adorable site you have! I just found you over at JDaniel4's Mom. I love all the things you did to learn about carrots, and your handouts are fabulous. I kept looking for a link to buy them. (I seldom buy printables but yours are really wonderful!) I'm excited to follow your site and see the other wonderful things you do!

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  2. I love all the fun activites you did :) my sob would love making the play dough carrots!

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  3. These are such great ideas and how appropriate to tie in to the carrot theme! :)

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  4. Looks like you had a lot fun doing your carrot study this week! Lots of fun and inspiring projects here!

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  5. Your worksheets are WONDERFUL!! You amaze me every week. You are so creative! I really adore your idea of cutting slits in a box to put the carrots into. That looks like so much fun! I've never read this book before so I just put it on my library list. Can't wait to give your ideas a try!

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  6. great activities - love the planting carrots! so many fun & creative ideas here!

    Would love for you to come link up some of your kid friendly activities to my child centered linky party The Sunday Showcase - http://momto2poshlildivas.blogspot.com/search/label/Sunday%20Showcase

    Bernadette

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  7. You have a wonderful unit. Love the carrot shape viewer and the fact you actuall grew carrot.

    Thank you for linking to Read.Explore.Learn.

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  8. I have to echo everyone else's comments- your carrot activities are AWESOME! There are so many skills you practiced with carrots! I struggled to figure out how to share printables awhile back but discovered Google Docs as a pretty simple way to go about it. If you need help, e-mail me (visit my site's ABOUT page for my e-mail address @ http://deceptivelyeducational.blogspot.com). I'm happy to help!

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  9. Very cute ideas I enjoyed reading through your blog I am following you now, I hope you follow me back as we have kids your kids ages.. We use
    FIAR for my younger ones, looks like you are using BFIAR or similar books. :) happy homeschooling

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  10. Wow!! LOVE LOVE LOVE!! Thank you for sharing your hard work, too. The printables are darling! Thank you for linking up!

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  11. Great job and love the printables! So much good stuff going on here! Thanks for linking up to The Sunday Showcase.

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  12. I love the carrot windows where the kids put something of the same color inside and all the other activities. I am a new follower!

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  13. Forgive me, but how do you play the roll and cover game? :)

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    1. They roll a die, count the dots, and cover that number of squares (We just used orange beads). The first one to cover their whole page wins. You could also use two dice and have them add them to make it a little harder. Sorry, I probably should have explained that in the post instead of assuming everyone knew :)

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    2. Thank you! I had the same question! :)

      Andrea

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  14. LOVE LOVE LOVE your ideas. I'm also doing FIAR with my 3 and 4 year old boys and am so excited to see someone with such imagination and organizational skills to add such great supplemental material! Thank you!

    Andrea Boyd

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  15. Thanks for the printables! I know exactly how that goes...you make something, then realize others want to use it too :-) Anyway, we used some of your printables with great success in Tot School this morning, so thanks :-)
    ~Sela
    http://selaandfamily.blogspot.com

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