Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Trees

We are making Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Trees with the extra coconut circles.  Chicka Chicka Boom Boom is a great book for this age.  Lots of repetition and a fun story overall.

We do as much as we can with the children's names so that they learn to recognize their own name, each other's names, and then can start to write their name.

Our tree starts with hand print branches.  We use a brush to paint on the child's hand.  We have found that it gives a more even coverage than if they dip their hand in the paint.  Then press the hand down for a branch.  Repeat for as many branches as you want.

While Melissa was painting hands, Kathy was stamping letters.  (We usually work one-on-one, especially in the beginning of the year.  We just call the kids from their play to work with us and then they go back to play. ) The children choose as many circles/coconuts as they needed for their name - every name is different!!  Then the children stamped one letter of their name in each coconut.  The names were saved in the muffin tin til later.

Later in the day when the paint was dry, the children glued on a trunk that was precut from textured wallpaper.  Then we got out their coconuts, put them in order and they glued the coconuts onto the trunk.  The first letter goes on top just like the "a" in the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom story.

Ta-da!!!   The tree is finished, but we are going to add more to the project this week. 


SKILLS INVOLVED: counting, recognizing letters, recognizing name, gluing, speaking and listening, textures - tree trunk and paint on hands, following instructions, fine motor

WOULD WE DO IT AGAIN: Definitely.  We actually did this two years ago, so knew it was a good project.  The kids had loved getting their hands painted and using the rubber stamps, the parents who saw us painting were thankful it was us and not them!

RECYCLE FACTOR: The coconuts were cut from scraps last week when we did the monkeys.  The tree trunks were cut from a textured wallpaper that we got at a yard sale a few years ago. 

Don't forget to check back later to see what else we do.