The Amazing Classroom: Hanging With the Threes

We promised you more on the door and here it is. Monkeys of course.

Monday monkeys. Saving room for the Tuesday class.

These were fun to make. We got the basic idea from Pinterest. But we adapted it since we needed them to be smaller for our door.

Since it is the beginning of the year we needed to check out the kids' scissoring skills. If we had done this later in the year the kids would have cut it all, but since we weren't sure how well they can cut we only had them cut the oval for the body.

Pieces needed. The body is 1/4 of a sheet of construction paper. The head is a 3.5" circle approximately. The ears are 1" circles. The arms and legs are about 1.25" wide.

Here he is. Some kids were able to do the folding. Others rolled. Whatever works. This was about as close to a "cookie cutter" product as we will ever get. Since it was the first day of school for both groups we did a lot more prepping than we would usually do. Our goal was to see what the kids were capable of, not to frustrate them. Although some were frustrated that they didn't get to do more and more and more!!

Here's another cutie. For the tail we asked the child to poke his finger at us. Then we wrapped the pipe cleaner around and around to make a crazy curly tail. Taped it to the back.

SKILLS INVOLVED: scissoring, folding, gluing, speaking and listening, body awareness, following instructions, fine motor

WOULD WE DO IT AGAIN: Definitely. It was a good balance of child involvement and prep for this early in the year. Later in the year they would do more of the cutting themselves. The kids had fun, the parents loved it, we finished on time - success!!

RECYCLE FACTOR: With the exception of the body ovals and the faces all the pieces were cut from scraps from the summer Cowboy Camp which most people would have thrown away.