Sharla Kostelyk

Fancy Nancy Activities

The Fancy Nancy book series is a great tool for expanding your kids’ vocabulary in a fun way.

I love how easy this book is to incorporate activities into! I read the kids the original Fancy Nancy book as well as Fancy Nancy Poison Ivy Expert. As I read, I added words to a list on the white board with the “plain” version on the one side and the “fancy” version on the other.Fancy Nancy books are great for vocabulary building!

Of course, us girls had to get dressed up before the stories began!

I found printable Fancy Nancy worksheets and activities here.

Naturally, since it is Fancy Nancy, we had to bring out the glitter glue!

The three girls also made Fancy Nancy paper dolls and clothes and made fancy purses.

For our snacks today, we had to go fancy, so we had hors d’oeuvres… beet and goat cheese crostinis, stuffed olives, fancy cheeses on crackers, and spinach, artichoke, and asparagus dip! And it goes without saying that we also drank tea with our pinkies up!

Fall Sensory Bin

By Sharla Kostelyk

Fall sensory bin

I love this time of year. Autumn or fall, no matter what you call it, is absolutely beautiful! I even love the smells. The colours, the crispness in the air, the harvest foods, I love all of it! So, that is the inspiration for this week’s Fall sensory bin. This could also be used as a decoration and play center at Thanksgiving.

I used popcorn seeds as the base and added Indian corn, a mini pumpkin, silk leaves, pine cones, and various sizes of cookie cutters in the shape of leaves and pumpkins. I also added a scoop so that the kids could play with the sounds of the falling popcorn seeds as they scooped and dumped.

If you are looking for more information on how and why to create your own sensory bins, check out my book on Sensory Bins!

A Bad Case of Stripes Activities

By Sharla Kostelyk

The book A Bad Case of Stripes has long been a favourite. In it, Camilla Cream gets a bad case of stripes because she doesn’t want to stand out, so she won’t admit to liking lima beans. The illustrations are great, the story is fun, and there is an opportunity for discussions afterwards on things such as bullying and being yourself.

After reading this book again to the kids, we did a few activities. They had a lot of fun! I think they especially enjoyed what we did to correlate to this book because we’ve read it so many times over the years that it’s familiar to them.

They especially got a kick out of this:

I printed out a picture of each of them and they gave themselves a bad case of stripes using markers. This is Snuggle Puppy’s finished work.

We also had a muffin tin lunch to go with the theme. Only a few things go with it as I just threw it together, but the kids liked it anyway and they all tried the lima beans. Some liked them, some did not!

-tomatoes
-cooked sausage
-striped fruit roll up
-chocolate zucchini cake
-plantain chips
-and of course, LIMA BEANS!

We had a discussion about the things that make us unique and how we should be proud of those things, not embarrassed about them. The kids talked about their feelings when they have been made fun of for being different. Then I had them each make an outline of themselves and in it, draw pictures of write words of things that they like. This is Miss Optimism’s. In case you can’t tell, that is a horse, a coconut, and an eggplant. She also added wavy hair and green eyes as other things that make her unique.

Dinosaur Activities

By Sharla Kostelyk

This week, we were working on “Dd”. We focused mainly on dinosaurs. Here was this week’s dinosaur themed muffin tin lunch:

-fries
-dino shaped chicken nuggets
-yogourt with dinosaur sprinkles
-dinosaur fruit snacks
-pepperoni sticks (logs)
-broccoli (trees)
-plastic dinosaurs as “garnish”

Excavating dinosaurs from ice. I got this great idea from I Can Teach My Child. To make these, I put a bit of water in disposable cups and froze them, then added a plastic dinosaur to each one and covered with water and continued freezing. I then took them out of the cups and kept them in a bag in the freezer until we were ready to use them. The kids used water in dinosaur shaped water guns and eye droppers and plastic knives to dig out the dinosaurs. They loved this activity!

Dino Dig – I gave the kids a kit where they dug out a glow in the dark dinosaur out of a dinosaur “egg”. This activity didn’t go as well because the kids didn’t like taking turns and because it created quite a bit of a fine dust which bothered Miss Optimism’s lungs. I wouldn’t recommend this activity as the ice one made less mess, was less expensive to make, and the kids enjoyed it more.

You can check out our dinosaur sensory bin here.

Here are some of the activities that I put in the kids’ workboxes this week:

-dinosaur measuring activity (idea from Counting Coconuts)

-dinosaur matching activity…I printed off cards on various sites for the kids to match up with the dinos in the bowl

-dinosaur graphing (from Confessions of a Homeschooler)

-I set up a pile of books about dinosaurs next to the reading corner so that the person who got this card in their bin could sit and read the ones that interested them

-Dinosaur Card Game

One of my favourite moments this week was when we decided to do our schoolwork in the kitchen so that I could get some pumpkin cookies made. The mood was light, the kids were helping with the cookies periodically, and after I had read from the Science textbook and Story of the World, we turned some music on and danced around before they started working on some of their worksheets!

Every day, we focused on a different dinosaur with activity sheets, colouring sheets, dot-to-dots, and information sheets. I got most of these from All Kids Network and Kidsparkz.

I used a few different tools to help the kids remember which direction the “d” and “b” face, including this cute “dog” and “bee” printable from Five Js.

In our Apologia Science, we started learning about the skeletal system and the kids are picking it up really well. Math U See continues to be going well. In Story of the World, we finished learning about Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar. The kids are still loving their gymnastics classes.

Dinosaur Sensory Bin

By Sharla Kostelyk

For this week coming up, we are working on the letter “D”, so I decided to throw a dinosaur study into it as well and I know the kids are going to love it!

To make the dinosaur sensory bin, I used dry lentils, dry garbanzo beans, rocks, a stick, triceratops bones for the kids to assemble, a few plastic dinosaur, a squishy glow in the dark dinosaur, and for fun, a dinosaur whose eyes bulge out when you squeeze it.

This is the most expensive bin I’ve made so far, with the triceratops bones costing $10 and the squishy dinos another $6 total.

Check out my book on Sensory Bins!

Learning Activities for the Letter “C”

By Sharla Kostelyk

This week, we featured the letter “C”. There are some great books that happen to start with the letter “C” which made this week a lot of fun. Monday, we read “Click Clack Moo; Cows That Type” and did some corresponding activities.

Tuesday, we read “If You Give a Cat a Cupcake” and did some corresponding activities, including of course making and decorating our own cupcakes!

Wednesday, we read “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” and did lots of corresponding activities.

In Story of the World this week, we continued to read about Julius Caesar and the Romans. We made crowns out of leaves. (incidentally, crown also happens to start with the letter “c”!)

After reading about how the Celts used to measure their height using their own foot, the kids traced their feet and I measured each of them using that foot cutout and then measured them with an actual measuring tape.

With the Celts system of measurement, Einstein and Dancing Queen are the same height! It was easy to see the flaws with this system and we were able to discuss why a standard measurement was better!

This week’s Sensory Bin was a bit boring, but oh well! I filled it with things from around the house that start with the letter “C”…chocolate chips (those didn’t last the week!), a crab, cat, cow, camera, cell phones, cars, clip, coat, clothes, caterpillar, centipede, cockroach, corn, cup, crayons, chicken, candles, cork, cabbage, clothespin.

“C” theme muffin tin tray:

-carrots
-cucumber
-crackers
-celery
-chickpeas
-cheese

The kids put on an impromptu rendition of the play “Snow White”:

My kids love to put on performances!

I “caught” the kids playing Addition Bingo two times this week…always nice to see!

Another great moment this week was when Miss Optimism surprised me by doing her sisters’ hair. Here they are with the finished looks:

Of course, the kids also did some Math U See, Apologia Science, continued our Penguin study, worked on Obedience lapbooks, and went to gymnastics class. All in all, it was a great week!

If you are looking for information on making sensory bins, you may be interested in my book.