Making Stained Glass Butterflies

One of the girls' favorite activities during the butterfly unit was making "stained glass butterflies", so I thought I would share the lesson. It is very easy, and lots of fun! We made them three times because the girls loved them so much. I am pretty sure all the window in the house have at least one butterfly on them. This lesson could also easily be changed to fit any subject - cars, trains, etc.

Supplies: contact paper, tissue paper, scissors, and construction paper. 

Skills: fine motor skills, color recognition, and counting

First we read the book Glasswings, A Butterfly's Story by Eliza Kleven. I rented it from our local library. It is about a glass winged butterfly who gets lost in a big city and helps the other animals to grow a garden. 

Next, I took contact paper and cut it to approximately 12 X12, and then cut the outline of a butterfly out of construction paper to fit inside the frame of the contact paper (which I totally eyeballed), making sure to leave the sticky side up - this is where you will attach the tissue paper. I took a few sheets of whatever tissue paper I had lying around and cut it into small squares. Next, I had the girls put the tissue paper on the sticky side of the contact paper until all the space was filled. We talked about the different colors and counted how many pieces of paper were going on the butterfly and whether our butterflies looked like the butterfly in the story.

Amita was very diligent and tried to keep in within the outline of the butterfly

Ashima, not so much, but that's okay. She loved the process!

Then, I put them up on the window. Voila! When the light shines through, it looks like stained glass! So easy and fun with both kids!

Color Recognition and Sorting

Amita has a hard time with colors. I have a difficult time understanding why this is when she can count to 20, count to 10 in Spanish and Bengali (my husband's mother tongue), and recognize words and all of the letters of the alphabet. If she can do all of that, why can's she recognize the color yellow? It baffles me. Because of that we've been hitting the color recognition pretty hard. There are some color activities in The Learning Box, which, as I've mentioned, is the curriculum I'm using. However, some of it is too advanced for Amita so I decided to supplement with my own stuff. 

So, the other day I was on the internet looking for ideas and I saw a post about someone using an egg crate to do some sorting and a stroke of brilliance hit me. "AH HA!", I thought to myself, "I know what to do!!!!" Whew. So, the next time I was at the grocery store, I bought a bag of different colored poms, similar to these. 

Basically, what I do is hold up one pom, make her identify the color, then put it in a spot in the egg crate. The next time I show her a pom of the same color, it goes in the same spot as the previous color until that spot is full. Since Amita is very tactile and loves organization, this is a great thing for her. I'm not sure if it would ever work with Ashima because I'm not sure she would care if the colors went together or not. 

She basically gets a double whammy because she recognizes the colors twice. Once to name it and a second to put it in the corresponding spot in the egg crate.

Eventually, once she gets the color thing down, I want to move to sorting not only by color, but size too.