This week we continued reading our Anansi the Spider stories, and we decided to draw a story called “Anansi’s Special Postman” from Donna Simmon’s curriculum, which can also be found in this book:
The pink of this form is the snake looking all around the dark house for Anansi. The green line in Anansi getting close to snake in the dark house then quickly turning around to find a safe place to hide.
This week we made beaded spiders using this pattern. After the spiders were finished, we made the webs. We simply dipped yarn into a glue/cornstarch/water mixture (I am sure either glue/water or cornstarch/water would work… I just was not sure so I mixed all three), then laid the yarn in a web pattern on a piece of wax paper. It dried overnight and we had beautiful webs for our spiders!
This last story was one of my favorites. It is called “Anansi and the Alligator’s Eggs”, and it is from the Anansi the Spider Man book. I wrote a short version of the story for daily reading practice.
We did more work on reading and sounds. Several days during our morning opening activities I gave him a bag of Bananagrams (A-Z), and he practiced putting them in order. Then we sang the alphabet song forwards and back.
With the Bananagrams still in alphabetical order, I had him find the vowels. Then I pulled out some vowel cards and we reviewed the long and short sounds.
Over the week we did some different exercises to review vowel sounds. I read some words to him aloud:
cap cup cop tap tip top hem ham him bed bid pit pot pat ten tin tan cut cot cat kit
He would point to the appropriate vowel card for each word.
I also gave him some little word cards to read and we would take 5 or so at a time to put in alphabetical order.
Anansi was a fun and productive block!