One Octopus. Eight Concepts.

We are finishing up our unit on the letter 'o', & it has been a lot of fun.  We really seem to enjoy these letter units.  One of the things we learned a lot about with this unit was the ocean.  If you've been following me for a while, you know that I love an art craft that lends to hands-on learning for many topics.  This octopus was just that: one octopus craft with eight different learning concepts.  I WISH that I could say that I purposely planned 8 different concepts to match the 8 octopus legs, but it was a complete accident.  I'm not that clever lol
First I drew a half-circle on a sheet of paper with the dots for numbers 1-8 and for the word "octopus" for tracing.  Dutch used his scissors to cut out the octopus and traced the word & numbers.  We practiced the phonetics for all of the letters in octopus & recognizing each letter.  He selected the pipe cleaners he wanted to use, and we made a pattern out of them for the legs.  Using the beads to match the number of legs, he had to count, color sort, & thread the beads onto the pipe cleaners.  To finish, we added some google eyes to our octopus :-)

With this activity we were able to:

practice patterns

handwriting

fine motor skills

phonics

scissor practice

counting

letter recognition

color sorting

This activity was fun, and honestly, it was efficient.  We got a lot of learning & discussion out of a single activity.  That's my kind of learning :-)