Misc. M Activities

Today was definitely a "Miscellaneous M" day.  :-)  Marbles were a big hit this week and Tuesday H. asked if we could do more marble stuff today and though it wasn't in my plans I tweaked my plans to include marbles.  He requested more marbles next week with our H week.  Hmmm!  :-D Anyway...

More Marbles

 Kind of a difficult activity to get any good pictures but here is what we did.  I used hula loops to keep the marbles contained.  I placed a tape line to give them direction and I showed them how to flick marbles like you do in a real marble game.  Good fine motor.  After practicing a bit, I then had one child roll dice and flick that many past their line.  Then the other children chose a number that was MORE than the rolled number.  We went back and forth taking turns rolling the dice or choosing a number that was more while interest lasted.

Marble Balance

 This was specifically for H and if you can believe it...I didn't get a single picture of him doing this!  He loves this type of thing and it's something he benefits from also...fine motor.  Also added scissors with the playdough as that's a favorite (and very beneficial) activity.

M is for Melt!

For our science/sensory today we explored with primary colored powdered paint and melting icecubes.  You could use this as an art project but truthfully, I've done this many times and children enjoy it but...it's definitely a process project  as the outcomes are all that "pretty" and often there are those children who will explore for a long time and eventually a hole will be made in their paper because of the water from the melting icecubes.

Marshmallow M's and Free Painting (and eating!)

 Putting those awful gigantic corn syrup fluffs to a good use.  LOL  Well, the kids don't really agree with my "awful" description but that sure is a lot of sugar!  H. painted his M with lines, K. did marshmallow M prints.  Interesting!

Me and Mom

Using markers to draw of course!

I wanted to share these two pictures.  Both were done by 4 year olds who are age-eligible to attend Kindergarten this fall.  This is just one reason why I respect Kindergarten teachers so much.  They are getting such a mixed group of abilities.  Yes, exposure and practice makes a difference in a child's ability to do many things but in this case...the main difference is age.  Yes, both are 4 year olds but really, the first picture was drawn by a 4 year old that will be five in a few weeks and the second picture is drawn by a child who is only a couple  months into year four.  Gender does play a part in fine motor development but really this shows that a few months make a BIG difference when it comes to Preschool/Kindergarten aged children. 

Monkey Writing Cards

www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com

A "special" movie: Math Circus by LeapFrog

This has been a favorite with all the children right from the get go.  But they don't watch it often because it's 30 minutes.  I'm not a big "screen time" person and find there are so many more "hands-on" things to do that I don't have time for so really, they usually end up watching a World World Segment, if that, that runs 10-12 minutes while I'm preparing lunch.  So this was "special" for them.  M is for Math.

We also had muffins and melons for lunch.  :-)

Calendar

Our wall is getting a bit full.  Time for some rearranging and refreshing but did want to mention a free printable available to do with months.  Titled: Months of Year cards.  It is a pdf. file that can be found at http://www.montessoriforeveryone.com/Cultural-Materials_ep_61-1.html. We started a month song when we came back from winter break since January is the first month of the year.  This makes for a nice visual for the song.  You can also see a sentence underneath our calendar.  I may have shared that before but will share again because it has really helped K. in  so many different ways.  She gives me a sentence and I write it on paper and then cut out using the word configuration format.  We put the words back together into the sentence.  It's so humorous when the sentence gets put together with words out of order, which happens at least once.  :-)  Humor makes learning fun! Doing a sentence like this allows for us to review that letters make words and words make sentences.  We talk about punctuation, spaces between words, what letters are capitalized and how most letters in the words are written in lower case.  We talk about tall, short and monkey tail letters, and also slip in word chunking.  I've also been mentioning that every chunk has a vowel when we sound out that word.  I find that this has helped many a child.  Normal development is that they hear and write out the consonants in their kid spelling but sometimes just pointing out that each chunk has a vowel makes them more aware.

And this is just a cute picture I'll share from today :-)

M is for Monkeys (and marbles)

Upper-Lowercase Letter Monkeys

We did all the letters that we've learned up to this point.

Muddy M's Magnetic Marble Painting w/ Scissors Activity

T. would often look underneath the tray and watch his wand vs. watching his magnetic marble on the tray.  :-)  But he participated!  Normally he stays clear of anything that might get him dirty.  LOL  Guess he figured the chance was high after watching the other two "paint".

The children snipped apart mice, moose, and monkeys and created their patterns at the top and bottom of their paper.  I especially like how many different pattern variations can come out of an activity like this.  :-)  Snipping isn't all that difficult for most 4+ children but I used very thin lines this time to make it a bit more of a challenge as well as help them concentrate on cutting thin lines vs. bold lines.

Marble Run

They spent quite a bit of time with these marbles.  A lot of squeals and giggles :-)  Oh the simple things!  This is actually a toy we have that "launches" cars down the ramp.

Monkey Seriation

http://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com/blog/2010/09/letter-m-for-monkey.html

Erica from Confessions of a Homeschooler has such great clipart in the activities she creates. Makes the activities appealing to the children.  We thank her for all that she has shared!

Of course we are using quite a bit of music this week.  http://www.abctwiggles.com/ has a little online story called Monkeys Make Music so, of course, we slipped that one in there today!

And our Mat Man turned into a Mat Monkey.  :-D

Great fiction book to introduce various types of monkeys.

M is for Magnets!

A fun morning full of magnet-ificent activities!   :-)

Using words from our reading lessons....

I printed sight words plus a few others that we've learned in our lessons from the book Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons by Siegfried Englemann onto paper and cut out using the word configuration concept.  K. chose one, read the word (this is a great review because she is seeing the word how it looks in reality vs. having the sound dots and other visuals to give her a clue on how to sound out the word), created it with Magnetix and read it again.  We are going to do a couple each afternoon this week.  Building things out of manipulatives is not something she naturally chooses during free play and etc so this is very good practice for her. 

Magnetic Marble Painting
Well, this was on our plans but we'll do it tomorrow afternoon as we had an hour out of our afternoon due to realtors here and then K.'s ride came about 50 minutes early.  So didn't get to the magnetic marble painting.  But...marble painting is always a hit around here with all ages.  An "oldie" that is always a favorite.  So we'll just vary it a little and use our magentic marbles and a magnetic wand to move it around on the tray.  :-)

Magnetic Number Memory

This was nice for T. (2.5yrs) also.  (Excuse the backwards three...we did notice it and corrected it!)  We talked about the magnetic numerals as we put them on the tray.  Then I removed one and K. guess which one was missing.  We also reviewed our numeral formation verse with each number writing the numeral in our sand tray before moving on and we also manipulated the numerals to make larger numbers 10-20. 

Found a Letter!

This was such a simple activity but she told me it was her favorite of the morning activities.  :-)  Anytime I add a song...it's a point of interest.

I placed magnetic letters inside of our sensory tub and encouraged K. to find them and put them in alphabetical order.  I did have the alphabet tray for her to use as a clue when she needed it.  The little song that we sang reviewed the letters sound also and went like...
Tune:  The Farmer in the Dell

You found the letter (B), you found the letter (B)

/b/ /b/ the letter (B)

You found the letter (B).

Obviously a very simple to remember song that they learn very quickly.  I like to reinforce the letter sound in that second verse.  After we sang the ABC and ABC sound song and reviewed our vowels. 

Magnadoodle:

Another simple way to reinforce number formation and counting.

Magnetic Foam Tower

I've had strips of foam that I purchased quite awhile ago and beyond using them for scissor snipping and collages I really hadn't used them for anything else.  Well, they are a perfect size for my magnetic strips so I simple created a set of strips for the children to explore with.  (Seriation, counting, patterning, etc)

Another way to make a tower.  Those two colors together appealed to her.  :-)

We also created a little book out of Mailbox publication, I Can Make It, I Can Read It: Science titled Margie Magnet.  Booklets make great scissors activities and a booklet like this helps conversation lead to the workings of the material you are working with...so in this case...magnets!

The little black rectangles are magnet strips so the hands can "attract".

We did a series of "tests" about what attracted and what didn't.

All in all...a profitable morning.  :-)

(Sometimes I wonder about this blog...I get it to how I want it and click on post...because I can't preview first for whatever the reason...and pictures and text are moved and spacing and font is different.  Weird.  Anyone else have this issue?)

Salt Art

Well, definitely a week I do not want to repeat.  I was off until Friday....so had one child on Friday and that was it for the week.  So we did various misc. activities.  One activity we did on Friday was Salt Art and my own boys wanted to do this over the weekend as well.  Very neat process art activity!  I definitely recommend this activity.

Simply put, children created a design with liquid glue (great hand strengthener), sprinkled heavily with salt, and used a paint brush with water colors to color their design.  I used liquid watercolors and not watercolor cakes.  Tip:  do not "paint" the water color onto the salt.  Just slightly touch one area of of the salt and watch the salt soak it up.  This was definitely a point of interest for the children.  The pictures don't really do justice for how bold the colors turned out.

N is for Nine Noodles!

Just enough time for a quick post so only a couple of pictures since that's what takes the longest and those two are self-explanatory!

 

N is for Nine Noodles!

Adding numbers to our button exploration.

Hope you all had a lovely week!  Ours flew by!

Slime

Ha!  Well, guess I'll post about slime...as that's what we ended up doing today. 



Maybe I’ll just go on the record to say that I’m pretty “old school” when it comes to some things.  One of the things I’m “old school” about is in my thoughts that unless a child practices a skill…uses a skill…they really won’t make positive progress with that skill.  Which is why each day I have activities planned for group/calendar, fine motor, sensory/science, art, math/numeracy, phonological awareness, scissors, etc  One early childhood philosophy out there is to let the children play and make their own choices all the time and they’ll learn what they need to during the course of their play.  So then we try to pull the children to do a certain activity within their center of choice.  Well, hmmm.  I believe that play is the child’s “work”.  I believe they learn best through play.  But you know what…if there is a choice of playing in sensory or with dramatic play all day (not necessarily using the materials we put there to encourage a certain type of skill exploration) vs.  working at a table with a fine motor activity or doing an art project …there are going to be some children who will choose the sensory/dramatic play and vice versa.  So my feeling is there needs to be a good balance.  And especially since in Kindergarten children will have to do a center rotation I find it very beneficial for preschoolers to learn how to deal with this scenario also.  So yes, we have free play but we also have planned activities that all children participate in, even if only for a few moments.  And when I plan those activities, I keep in mind children’s interest but reality is that we do have to do things we don’t want to do…even in Kindergarten and especially in adulthood.  So thus my expectation is that each child try each activity and the neat thing is that most children become interested in the activity even if they wouldn’t have necessarily chose it on their own.  I very seldom have uninterested students.  They truly benefit from the experience.  However, about once a month or so I just set various activities out…typically a “sensory day” with the idea that the children can choose what they work with and for how long.  Well, today, H. chose to play with the slime for over an hour.  K. went ahead and did another sensory activity but was soon back at the slime.   J

Incredible Foam

So, obviously slime was a hit.  :-)  Simple to make...1/2 C of Elmer's glue, 1/2 C liquid starch, food coloring makes a perfect amount for an individual child. 

N is for numbers!

Our first day back after break went smoothly.  :-)  We ran out of time for some things since they both had a lot to chat about but conversations are important too so that is just fine. 

Today I planned to do familiar activities...typical of what I do after a break.  Just gets us back into the routine, etc.  Much of what we did today are activities I have posted about in the past so will refrain in repeating.  Here's a couple "new" activities we did that used familiar materials.

Number/Letter Sort w/ Playdough

 

First I worked with them to create long snakes to make the numerals 1 through 9.  They are coming right along with snake making.  :-)  Each child had a different color playdough so that allowed for a pattern to be created/reinforced.  Then I went through a selection of playdough letter/number stampers.  If it was a number they stamped the correct playdough number.  This was very much enjoyed.  :-)  If it was a letter, I stamped where it would go in the number words.  We repeated "a number we can count with; a letter we can read/spell with".  They really stayed engaged until right up to the end when all the numbers had been stamped but there were a few more letters.  So next time I'll make sure that I leave a number stamp until the end!  Ha!  There was a reach here because we had to put the numbers up high enough on the table so that there was enough space to work right in front of them...so next time...we'll do it on the floor.

Odd/Even Numbers Wok and Roll

            Excuse his reach...we did correct the situation.  :-D

 One can often add a concept to a game you already have.  Here I used our Wok and Roll game to add a task about odd and even numbers as well as incorporate a bit of fine motor.  I used stickers to label the vegetables with numbers.  We talked about the labeled odd/even bowls and on a whim I used M&M's as manipulatives to match up buddies to find out if the number was odd/even.  We didn't go through all the numbers...only about half.  It would have been very time consuming and I don't think they would have stayed interested much longer so I would rather stop them when their interest is high.  :-)

The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson

A "special" we did today that really had nothing to do with numbers but I wanted them to have the opportunity...they love this book and so when I saw it on our library's New DVD shelf I picked it up.  We did talk about characters and how many there were in the book vs. in the movie.  We also clapped out each of the characters names.  Slipping things in like that is always beneficial! 

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