2011 September

The Random Toy Collection

Doesn’t it seem like toys come out of the woodworks to find their way into your playroom and toy chests?

I am assuming every household has an assigned place for random toys, or maybe you make frequent trips to your local donation drop-off.

But, I have found that there are definitely uses for your toy bin (full of happy meal toys, childhood toys, birthday presents, and more.)

Here are a few ideas….all sorting activities:

(Remind yourself that I am NOT a photographer and I am NOT fancy)

1 . Write down the beginning letters that the majority of the items in the box start with on project paper or a sketch pad. Before you ask your little one to help you sort the beginning sounds TALK about the items and name each one first. For example, “here’s a /d/ /d/ duck and a /s/ /s/ swing, what is this (picking up a new item)?” Then, TALK about each letter: “This is the letter “S” it stands for the /s/ sound….are there any toys in our bin that start with that sound?”

2. Write as many color names as you want on a sheet of paper and name each color or ask your little one to help you sound out the color names that are listed. Then ask your little one to sort/group the items by their color. Ask questions about the “data” afterwards: “How many orange toys are there? How many more red toys than yellow?”

3. Write one digit numbers and their number word in a clear and organized chart. Ask your little one to find something (a person, a car, an animal) that has more than one of it’s kind in the toy bin. Give an example first like “There are only 2 cars in this toy bin so I will take them out and place them in my “two” square to show that there are two of the same kind of toy in my bin. Can you find something else in our toy bin that has a match that would make a pair?”

4. Write down size words in an organized chart, choosing whichever words you want to focus on such as “big/little,” “small/medium/large,” “tall/short,” etc. Then 1) demonstrate an example, 2) have your little one “help you” find another example, and 3) have your little one come up with an example on their own.

Have fun creating your own sorting charts and ALWAYS feel free to share photos of your mommy teacher “style” of doing things with The Mommy Teacher Fan Page 🙂

September 16, 2011 by Jessica | 0 comments

What’s Missing?

Children can be really good at “rote” memory – they can sing their ABC’s all day, but that doesn’t always mean that they know their alphabet inside and out.

It is also very common for a little one to mistake a letter for a number or a number for a letter.

So, I made these ABC and 123 sentence strips using di-cut letters (hand-written looks just as good) so that I can help my little ones use their ABC skills to figure out which letter OR number is missing from the alphabet/counting order.

This is an activity that you want your little one using their problem solving skills to figure out. So, don’t fuss if they sing their ABC’s to get to the letter in order to figure it out (that is a resource for them). This is good practice for your little one to start recognizing letters and numbers with increasing observation.

I have made another FREEBIE for you, a printable for your little ones to practice as well. It is a fill in the blank of upper and lower case letters and one fill in the blank of counting. These are activity sheets with only ONE letter/number missing at a time. But I will make two letter, and three letter missing fill in the blanks soon. So, for now, start with the freebies below and see how well your little one can fill in those blanks! 🙂

ABC fill in the blank

123 fill in the blank

September 13, 2011 by Jessica | 0 comments

Pledge Your Allegiance With Your Kids

September 11th is a day that I want to recognize and commemorate by sharing the ways that I have always taught kids about our allegiance to our nation:

Even though I quoted the Pledge of Allegiance EVERY day in grade school verbatim, I still didn’t have a clue what the meaning of it was until about the 4th grade because of the higher order vocab like “allegiance, republic, indivisible, etc.” You can start introducing a wider vocabulary to kids at a younger age as long as you connect the meaning to those words in multiple ways. For the pledge (teaching about our allegiance to America), you can do this using:

Activities and Lessons

and by using the words in context more often.

The Pledge of Allegiance

Hubbard’s Cupboard has my favorite pictures for kids that are simple and that you can even incorporate into a book printable. The printables I use most are the “day 2” printables and hey, they are FREE 🙂

You can also put these pictures on cards, whole punch the corner of the cards, and put them on a binder ring to flip each card as you say the pledge.

Can I get a “God Bless America!!!” ???

September 11, 2011 by Jessica | 0 comments

Simple Number Search Round 2

The other day I posted a template of the numbers 1-5 so that your little one could carefully concentrate on, and color, one number at a time. Well, I wasn’t lying when I told ya I’d post numbers 6-9 soon, and I even threw in “0” just because I love ya!

So, here are the simple number search “puzzles”:

Simple Number Search 6-9,0

If you didn’t get a chance to read the first Number Search Post for a little more explanation and directions- click HERE

And just a reminder….the “answer sheet” will look something like this:

September 8, 2011 by Jessica | 0 comments

Casey’s Activity Sheet Organization

Casey and I think a lot alike as you might have already noticed, so I just have to share her examples of collecting her little one’s work:

Don’t you love how clearly labeled this is? She’ll actually be able to remember which year AND grade that the recording sheets were collected… and she will actually be able to see his growth over the course of the year.

Casey said that James helped her create this page in a word document (“meaning that is took forever” -in her words). But he chose to have the numbers and letters and chose the wordart colors and graphics too.

**The neat thing about the awesome mommy teacher that Casey is, is that this binder wont just be valuable to Casey, it will be valuable to James as well because he HELPED make it, AND it is a collection of his work to be proud of.**

Here you might notice that the dividers she chose are: Readiness skills, Writing, and ABC-123 which are perfectly appropriate divider titles for organizing Pre-K artifacts 🙂