Ants Go Marching

So, I've been trying to come up with creative ways to help our students master their letters and a few that are already working on Kindergarten sight words. We've been talking about insects at school for the last 2 weeks and the lead teacher I work with is allowing me to do a few lessons to get more experience, before hopefully securing a teaching spot next year. Well, I found a cute game on Pinterest and I set out to the Dollar Tree to find the supplies I needed. I don't know about you guys but I could probably spend hours in that place looking at everything. I know the stuff is cheaply made but I don't want to spend and arm and a leg on school stuff, so I'm all about the Dollar stores.

Anyway, since summertime is around the corner they were already selling picnic supplies and the wheels started turning in this noggin' of mine on a clever way to cutesify our game and also make it more realistic. So here is what I came up with.

Ant Swat

Isn't is precious? I will say they shockingly didn't have any flyswatters but I found a 3/$1 pack at Dollar General. The table cloth was $1 and I printed the ants off on cardstock I already had. You can't beat $2 on a educational game that I know my kids are going to LOVE! Oh and I thought the tablecloth was going to be a big square but I clearly didn't read the dimensions since it's actually a huge rectangle one. I just folded it in half and it should still be plenty big for our crew. I printed sight words on the ants shown and I also did upper and lowercase letters. I plan on using this game during small group times so I can use the cards that will work best for each group, depending on their current level.

*We are about to study honeybees this week so I'm thinking about making a beehive version of this but we'll see how they react to this game first! Don't you just love Pinterest? :)