Feelings Lapbook & Letter Ff Fun

Our Feelings Lapbook was a HUGE success!  I really can't tell you just how happy I am that I decided to do it with my little guy. He learned a lot and I learned a few things too! I'm hoping that our work on recognizing our feelings and being able to put a name to them will help with him being able to understand and communicate how he feels instead of acting out in frustration. I've actually already seen examples of this in my son in just the past week!

We also used this as an opportunity to talk about "choices." When we feel angry or sad or jealous, we have choices. We can hit, we can scream, we can fall on the floor crying, or we can make "good boy" choices and share, wait our turn, find another toy or ask Mama for help. Reminding Dude that he's in control of these decisions seems to be helping improve his behavior more than me just telling him how he should act. I'm certainly not implying that my son was suddenly transformed into a perfect little angel, but I've definitely seen improvement in the way he interacts with his brother. This has been absolutely wonderful to see! =)

You can see the details of how we put this lapbook together and exactly what's in it HERE.

The main book that we used for this week was The Way I Feel by Janan Cain. It's an EXCELLENT book in my opinion. I looked at some others that seemed like they'd be great for a kindergartener or elementary student, but this one is simple, expressive, beautifully illustrated and a fun read! I think it's perfect for the preschool set. (You can find the other books we used for individual emotions in the widget at the bottom of this page.) 

After reading The Way I Feel we kicked off our lapbook study by reading our feelings mini-book, and then discussing each of our matching feelings cards. I then laid out one set face-up and let him match them up.

   

The next thing Dude choose to do were his Color the Feelings cards. We used our Dry Erase Crayons for these and ended up splitting them up over several days.

The favorite lapbook activity of the week were these popsicle stick puppets. Dude played with these a lot! We started off with me narrating stories while Dude acted them out and put on the appropriate faces. He then moved on to telling me his own stories. (We used milk jug caps as props.)

This story ended with "Mama put Dude & Spudder to bed."  My poor little babies..... :)

   

Another day we used our matching cards to play a game of memory. This required a greater degree of visual discrimination than your typical memory game since all the faces were yellow circles. I had to keep encouraging Dude through the first couple matches, but after that he got into it and did pretty well with the rest of the game. 

   

I had hoped Dude would enjoy drawing some silly faces on the This is Me... page, but he had no interest in doing that. He just wanted to scribble all over it. So we went with that and I helped him completely scribble in the face. Then I showed him how he could draw on it by erasing the marker with his finger. He thought this was neat! 

   

We also did some other Letter F activities to fill out our week. We did some tracing, but tried it a little differently than our norm. I wrote the letter with dry erase marker and let Dude erase it by tracing over it. He tried it using the felt tipped eraser end of a marker and then just using his fingers.  The fingers turned out to be a better option because he often wasn't exactly over my line with the eraser. But he was really eager to do it both ways, so I'll probably keep both in mind as ways to mix it up. With my son variety is definitely key so I'm glad to have a couple new ways to work on letter formation.

After he'd done the tracing a few times he was ready to take the pen and draw his own letters. (These worksheets are from the collage and trace packet over at Tired, Need Sleep. I really like them because they have arrows on them showing the proper way to form the letters. If you haven't seen this blog you're really missing out!)

He did his letter hunt worksheet.

And see he actually does have some control while coloring! Most often when I give him something to color or even just blank paper, he'll fiercely scribble and then declare he's all done. I was surprised to see him carefully coloring in the small rectangles on this worksheet. Not sure why he was doing it, but I was glad to see that he does have the necessary fine motor control to color intentionally. 

   

And of course there was dot painting! Have I maybe mentioned before just how much this kid LOVES his Do A Dot Paints ? We just couldn't leave them at home! 

These were magnet pages that I printed from Making Learning Fun, but if you're looking for do-a dot pages I later found a better resource for them over at dltk-kids. You can print these in black and white.

We used the How Are We Feeling? faces and base along with the handy dandy example card Carisa included with this pack to review our feelings some more. Dude also really liked this activity.

I gave Dude a mirror and we flipped through the Feelings flip book and tried making faces showing how we might look on the outside when we feel a certain way on the inside. 

We made this fun and simple Fire Craft. You can read all the detail about it HERE.

We also had a lot of fun using our feelings cards for a Musical Feelings Game. You can see exactly how we played HERE.

We also had fun playing another active game called Put Out The Fire.  You can see all the details of the 3 different ways we tried that game HERE.  

(Bloggy Note: I've decided to start posting our active learning activities as separate posts, mostly to make navigating this blog as easy as possible. As the mother of 2 busy boys, I'm quickly realizing that if there's anything on this blog I'm going to want need to recall quickly it's going to be the things that get my guys moving and help them burn off some energy!) 

Our Book Picks For The Week:

 

 

Look out for a new Preschool Lapbook debuting next week!

I'm linking this post up to Tot School , Preschool Corner, Show & Tell Blog Hop, the Ultimate Alphabet Craft Collection, For the Kids Fridays, Tot Tuesdays,  Feed Me Books Friday & Read Explore Learn