Wormy Art and Handwriting

Welcome to the last official Wormy Wednesday! I've had so much fun developing this earthworm unit with Andrea from No Doubt Learning and Erin from The Usual Mayhem. 

  

One of the art projects we did as part of our worm unit was to use rubber worms to stamp patterns. However, it became a bit more like worm throwing than stamping here at our house!  

Like many boys in kindergarten, my son is not a big fan of practicing his handwriting. I have written    a lot about how well we've done with Handwriting Without Tears (HWT).  During our earthworm unit I continued some handwriting practice using the slate of HWT, and his workbook, but we also did some sensory activities with the letter "W" as well as the word "worm." 

I printed out the letters in the word "worm" and we did several things with these. I offer these printouts as a free download at the end of this post. The first was we used rubber worms to make the letters. We found that putting the cardstock in plastic sleeves helped the worms to stick to the paper so they would more easily form the letters.

I laminated the sheet with the word "worm" on it (in the free download I also include the word in all lowercase letters) so we could have a bit more messy fun! I put magnets in the corners to hold the sheet down while we played. 

First, we poured clean play sand into the tray...

While the sand worked fine, I think potting soil, or even mud would be a great extension activity! 

In this free download has 7 pages; the letters W,O, R, M, S, and then one sheet with the word "worms" in uppercase letters, and another in lowercase. 

Click here or the image above for the Worm Mat Google pdf file. 

And I think I'll also add a You Tube Video of James Hudyma singing "Nobody Likes Me, Everybody Hates Me, I guess I'll Go Eat Worms!" We LOVE this video and played it almost daily during our earthworm unit! Its a Dad (who can actually sing) playing the guitar for his little girl! Precious! 

I would like to invite you to join in our Wormy fun, and link up any earthworm activities you have! These don't need to be for young kids, but any age at all! Visit our Worm-Themed Linky!  

Don't forget that I've placed all my earthworm posts on a page by themselves. You can get to this page by clicking on the Worm Unit graphic in the sidebar. 

Consolidated Earthworm Unit Plan (Coming Soon!) 

While we three moms had a lot of fun organizing this unit together (we love Web 2.0 tools like Pinterest and Google Docs), we know that having information about this unit spread across three different blogs is not easy for planning. So we have constructed a Google Doc that lists the activities by subject. 

    

While I do have a few more worm-themed activities to post, this is our last official Wormy Wednesday, and I just want to take a moment to thank both Andrea of No Doubt Learning, and Erin of The Usual Mayhem for allowing me to work collaboratively on this unit. I am new to homeschooling, new to early child-hood education and I feel so much indebted for all I have gleaned from the experience of these two wonderful moms. I learned a lot about putting a thematic unit together, about creating my own documents (my food chain activity was a new thing for me), and about blogging!  I've LOVED working you ladies and hope to again someday!