X is for X-ray

October 13th we tackled the letter X. Not many things start with it, and those that do don't really make it's sound, so we did a lot of activities that involved words ending with X, as well. We also got creative about it. . .

We started off talking about the X in the skull and crossbones symbol for pirates and put together these awesome hats and eye patches.

We then found a pirate treasure map where X marked the spot. The hunt took us all through the house and the kids took turns finding the clues and figuring them out.

These were our different maps. Each one had a new location on it, taking us closer and closer to the X! The last map showed the X next to the decorative pine trees by the kitchen.
And there it was! There was a box under the X, so they opened it to find

six tupperware containers full of ingredients needed to fix sugar cookies.

We went to the mixer and took turns pouring in the contents.

While the dough chilled, I read the book Jessica's X-ray which had a few real x-rays on some of the pages. Then the kids colored a person outline to look like them.

Here's the one I did as an example. I then carefully lined up the matching skeleton and stapled it to the back. When you hold it up to a sunny window,

you can see the bones inside and it's like an x-ray. If you would like a pdf of this project, click here.

By then our cookie dough was ready and I had the kids make X shapes with it for our snack.

Here, the kids are twisting pipe cleaners into an x shape to be whiskers on the fox masks they were assembling.

We talked about the poison sign and that most things that are dangerous don't have this symbol to warn us. I told them that cleaners, medicine and lawn chemicals can be poisonous.
I set up the coffee table with lots of items and had them place a poison symbol on the things they should never play with.

At the end of class, we played some tic-tac-toe with sparkly pipe cleaner x's and o's.