No, we’re not knitting away our sadness or sculpting our fears - at least not today. We are feeling some more feelings, assisted by one of our favorite craft projects: the emotions face! LOVE these things! Use them a million ways:
And many more. But before you can use them, we need to make them.... Get Ready to Craft! Assemble:
If you're making several faces, I say skip the cardboard in favor of cheap paper plates. We love to have the kids each make their own Emotions Face, so our execution doesn’t need to be highly durable so much as highly do-able in repetition. Ok.... it's also because more pliable materials reduce scissor fatigue - or whatever it’s called when you’ve been cutting out so many things, or cutting such hard-to-cut things, that the shape of the scissor handle becomes permanently imprinted around the base of your thumb…. Instead, I prefer a material that can be bent and cut, and have holes punched in it, with relative ease. Cardboard does not meet this standard for me, so grab some cheap plain paper plates from your local pizzeria (or order them). Bonus: they are already face shaped, which saves time cutting out a lot of blank face circles! Our hole punchers can’t reach more than an inch or two beyond the border of the face. So unless you have a very fancy long-necked hole punching device, you’ll need to fold the face in order to punch holes in it to attach the features.
Make A Face! Paper Plate Edition... We often skip the tears/cheeks as I feel they can be more hassle than useful (plenty of ways to show sad without actual crying), but some people like them. If you want to use the cheeks/tears, glue them back-to-back. Then thread a needle with thread or skinny yarn through the top of the cheek/tear pair.
Alternative: If you’re willing to eventually lose/squash some of the facial features when they are not attached, to sacrifice a little precision in the manipulating of the features, and to invite Mr Potato Head style feature-swapping, you could ditch all the hole punching and fasteners and just use velcro dots to attach all the features. All Done! Bring a Bitty City Players Social-Emotional Learning workshop to your school! Contact us here
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Today we’re feeling our feelings, kiddos! Social-emotional learning (SEL) is one of the most important parts of early childhood education, in the classroom and at home. Happy Wednesday! Today is International Positive Thinking Day! So today’s resource focuses on Positive Thinking and the Growth Mindset. If you’re not yet familiar with the Growth Mindset, it’s a way of thinking - backed up by scientific research - to develop perseverance and resilience in the face of difficulty, and it opens up doors to new successful and quantifiable strategies for teachers and parents, in fact for anyone who is with a child when that child encounters something difficult.
It's back to school time, and that means any day now it will be... Fire Drill Time 😱 I don’t know about you, but every year I dread subjecting my preschoolers to the blaring alarms and bright flashing lights. I know that it’s important for their safety, but it can be scary and overwhelming for a little person. One year my co-teacher and I felt that it would be helpful to create a fun, upbeat fire drill song, and we noticed that the students LOVED its sing-songy playful tune and were actually excited for fire drills! The children enjoyed both singing the words and then silently mouthing the words to practice being quiet for the drill. Click Below to learn the best Fire Drill Song for preschoolers! CLICK HERE to request the FREE printable PDF of the fire safety poster pictured! (8.5'x11', no watermark) (we're still working on our email automation, but we'll get you the printable PDF file very promptly!) Pardon the 80s-tastic graphic, but Heart to Heart really is one of my favorite community-building activities for my class! It can be used for almost any age group and takes no more than twenty minutes. It works particularly well during a meeting time when students can communicate directly with each other, using kind and complimentary words. I recommend setting a time in your schedule to do this once a week. I usually end with this activity every Friday. We think it's a beautiful way to start the weekend. We are a little early for our scheduled Wednesday post, but as a special thank you to you, our first blog readers, we wanted to provide this fun free classroom decoration! The children are coming! The children are coming! (back to school) Are you ready, teachers? We bet you are, because you're awesome. But just for good measure, here's a classic from our back-to-school print-and-go resources trove. Today: Student Photo Frames in two themes, owls & flowers. Use these (free!) printables on a wall, on the classroom door, in the hall, wherever you need. Students can draw their own faces into the circles, or you can snap a photo of each kid, print, cut out the face, and glue the faces in the circles. Wise Little Owls |
Bitty City Players offers theater and science enrichment through after-school programs, in-school workshops, and events for ages 1-10 in NYC.
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