Symmetry is Eggciting!

For this activity it's easier to show an eggsample:

There are 10 different designs with a Spring theme such as a bunny, tulip, and a basket of eggs. Easter is coming soon so if you need a fun math + art project, please check out the Preview on my TeachersPayTeachers store. It includes a free sample of the ladybug and butterfly designs to try.

The full PDF has two levels: the half designs as shown above or complete ones for kiddos who are too young to draw the missing part. The young ones can color in their egg to make it symmetrical. Here are a couple with a weather theme:

The cover shows the bird sitting on a nest and the frog:

I had a great time creating this, hope you and your kiddos enjoy it! Please follow my blog and my TPT store to hear about new books and activities.

Update: For a wonderful blog post by a new 2nd grade teacher who used this with her students and took lots of great photos, check out Luckeyfrog's Lilypad!

Spring Basket Craftivity

A year or two after graduating from college, I made a list of career goals and one of them was to create craft books. While a few of my earliest picture books had some crafts included, for the most part that interest of mine has been on the back burner. Now that the digital age is upon us, it's much easier to test ideas online and see how it goes. Since December, I've been posting free and priced products on my Teachers Pay Teachers store and have sold quite a few things. Thousands of my freebies have been downloaded, which is pretty amazing.

But the real fun has been to think of an idea, design and make it, and put it online to see how people like it. No waiting for an editor to respond, no printing/shipping/etc. to deal with, just neat little electrons being exchanged amongst people with common interests. Here is the latest one, called What's In My Basket? It's a printable "craftivity" which (to me, anyway) means a craft with an educational component. This is what the basket looks like closed with the contents "peeking" out:

And here it is opened up:

For the educational part, students read and write spring-themed words, plus complete a writing prompt. A group of these would look cute on a bulletin board, don't you think? 

What gave me the idea to have the flap that opens is all those "interactive" apps that are now available for mobile phones and tablets. My theory is that there are plenty of interactive things to be done with paper, crayons, markers, and scissors, right? Click here to check out the various items in my TPT store. And if you're interested, by all means "follow" my store to be notified of new things as they are posted.

Thanks for stopping by!

Spring Mirror Word Puzzles

Don't worry, your screen isn't broken. This image is from Spring Mirror Word Puzzles, a word work + math activity I made to go with my new picture book Seeing Symmetry. Some of the Spring-theme words are reversed and/or upside down while some of them are missing half, like this:

Students will need a small mirror to solve the puzzles and record the answers. To download your free copy of this 5 page activity PDF from my Teachers Pay Teachers store, just click this link or the cover image below:

If you're on Pinterest, I have a board full of great pins about symmetry. Pinterest has become my favorite social media site because it's so visual. If you're interested in joining, I'll be happy to send you an invite (which is much faster than requesting one from the site.)

Anyway, hope you and your kiddos enjoy this activity…all fingers are crossed for an early Spring!

Seeing Symmetry is here!

While I knew my latest book was for spring 2012, it was a nice surprise a few days ago to find out it's in the warehouse and is shipping right now. Eeeek! Guess my procrastination about making a trailer had to end sometime:
I've been working on the idea of a picture book about symmetry for a long time, and finally it's here so yay! In the years of wrestling with how to present this topic, I kept worrying that some other author would scoop me. Because for some odd reason, very few trade books about symmetry have ever been published (for children, that is.)

Perhaps it's an age thing…a few decades ago when I was in elementary school, if symmetry was ever brought up at all it would have been in an art class. However, my nieces and nephews knew all about line and rotational symmetry because it was added to the math curriculum quite some time ago. (There are additional types of symmetry, but those are the ones covered in this book.)

Because symmetry is such a fabulous combination of art and math, it was a natural topic for me. I've created some symmetry activities, including some free heart templates which could come in handy in the next week or so to make a few valentines. Here is a better look at the front:

And here's what the back looks like:

Yep, it really is backwards! If you don't have a book about symmetry in your library, by all means ask your librarian to please order it. : )


Thanks!

Loreen

C'mon, get hoppy! My Frogs 'n' Flowers Clip Art collection

It has been fun making clip art, something I hadn't considered doing during my first couple of decades as a children's book illustrator. But in this digital age it suddenly seemed like an interesting idea. After thinking about it for awhile, I decided to have a very liberal usage policy while retaining the copyright. So, if teachers want to make classroom materials from these images and sell them, for example, that's fine with me. Frogs 'n' Flowers is posted on my store at Teachers Pay Teachers, a site for lesson plans and other teaching resources. A free sample of a border design is included in the Preview file, see close up below:

I've made several other free activities, printables, and coloring pages that are also on my store. So if you're interested if hearing about future offerings, please click on the "follow me" link when you get there.

In reading the TPT forums, it appears that some teachers like to have black and white options to save on printer ink. It often looks better to do a custom conversion, rather than just print a color image in black. So, here are the line art images in the Frogs 'n' Flowers set:

I'll be interested to see what people make with these images.

Make a Symme-TREE: a free Winter or Christmas holiday tree printable activity

I’ve been busy in the last few days making activity pages for my spring 2012 book, Seeing Symmetry. There is a very cool site called Teachers Pay Teachers that has about a zillion free and paid lesson plans, slide shows, and other classroom materials. Students can make a symmetrical Christmas holiday or winter tree out of squares and rectangles with this printable activity. They measure and mark a line of symmetry on construction paper then cut out, sort, and arrange the shapes. The snowflakes will help them center each shape along the line of symmetry. It’s great for math centers and instructions are included. To download this FREE 3-page PDF, please click to visit my “store.”

Cover shows coloring example

Also available is this FREE line symmetry cowboy boot printable coloring page.

The idea is for students to color in each boot so they are mirror images of each other.  Complete directions are included.


Enjoy!

Cowboy boot line symmetry coloring page

Saddle up for a fun way to explore line symmetry…if you click on the low-res image above, it'll go to my web page where you can download the high-res PDF. The idea is that students color the boots identically as mirror images. So, if the heel is brown on one boot, the heel is brown on the other boot. Simple counting questions reinforce the symmetry concept that if one boot has 3 big stars, the other boot must have 3 big stars also.

This activity page is adapted from my upcoming spring 2012 picture book, Seeing Symmetry. Enjoy!