Month: January 2011

Fill in the Rhyme

“Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candle________”

This is the third phase of rhyming: Generating the rhyme that would complete the sentence.  However, you and I not only intrinsically rhyme, but we are familiar with this rhyme and if we are not, we could just use our deductive reasoning to figure that the word missing is “stick.”

Little children are trying to learn patterns in familiar rhymes so that they can acquire these skills.

So, first I want you to read your child some nursery rhymes or other rhyming books you may own, and after they are familiar with them, read them again without the second rhyme, giving them a few seconds of “wait time” to guess what rhyme is missing.

Then, I want you to print the following template:

Color The Rhyming Picture

Color The Rhyming Picture Poem

Poetry

You are going to ask them to generate the rhyme and then color in the picture for the poem, or you can just ask your child to color the picture that rhymes with _______(for example, “fun”-and the answer would be “sun”).  My suggestion is to allow your child to name all the images in the picture first so that they will not be so confused when trying to identify the rhyming picture.

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Patterns (Round 2)

Following up on the “Pattern Introduction” post, here is an activity and some info on the next phase of introducing patterns….

Before we start, if you have been doing the rhythmic patterns I want you to practice some more, introducing the letters ABC.

So you might clap, snap, snap, clap, snap, snap while saying “A, B, B, A, B, B” because you are doing one thing and then another so you move to a different letter of the alphabet to name that movement, and so on and so on.  This is due to the fact that universally movement patterns, color patterns, and shape patterns are often represented using the letters of the alphabet. 

You can teach them this by saying “If I am doing two motions then I need two letters to stand for them so I am going to use the first two letters of the alphabet ‘A’ and ‘B’.  Let’s try an AB pattern: stomp with the right foot, stomp with the left foot, but lets use the letters to stand for our stomping, ‘A, B, A, B’ while stomping left, right, left, right.  If I clap when I say ‘A’ and I snap when I say B then it would sound like this ‘A, B, B, A, B, B’ but if I made up a beat with 3 movements then I would need the next letter in the alphabet to stand for the new movement: Touch your head, shoulders, knees, head, shoulders, knees…. ‘A, B, C, A, B, C.’”

So, the next phase of patterns is allowing some symbol (like letters) to represent the movement, but other than introducing letters verbally as we just have as a listening and doing activity, we are going to incorporate visual representations of the movement.  So your child is going to follow a pattern, by looking at pictures, not just listening and following along with you.

Here are 3 separate patterns to follow, click on the image and print it out; see if your child can tell what movements to do by “reading” the directions: 

Take pictures of your child doing other movements, put them into a word document in a pattern, and print.  Your child will have so much fun with that!

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Drawing A Person

Drawing a person is a very meaningful experience for little ones. For most children, this is the first figure they can identify that they have drawn themselves.  There is a progression that follows.   Children initially draw a circle for a head, then the arms coming out of the head, then the legs coming out of the head, etc.  It take a while before children develop their person into a more comparable human form with a head, body, arms, legs, facial features, and possibly even hands and feet. 

This is an activity that helps their writing development in many ways.  It helps with fine motor skills.  It helps children to communicate through drawing (similar to the purpose of writing). Additionally, it gives children a template to build on incorporating their creativity.

So, today’s activity it to sit down with your child with a sketchbook and some colored pencils and model drawing a person (draw your child or someone else who is of importance to your child).  Talk through each part and ask them questions.  What shape is their head?  What is under their head? (neck/body) What color should I draw their hair?  Should I draw boy clothes or girl clothes? 

Finally, write the name of the person you drew while talking about each letter and sound.  This is a great lesson for young children to begin brainstorming how to communicate through written language.

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Even More to Learn About Rhyming

There are 3 different rhyming skills:

1) Listening to words and identifying whether or not they rhyme:  Do these words rhyme: “cat/rat”? ; Do these words rhyme: “hot/shoe”?

2) Listening to rhyming words and coming up with another one: “mop, stop, ________”  (Even if they say a made up word like shlop.)

3) Coming up with a rhyming word for a single word: “Can you think of a word that rhymes with day?”

My earlier rhyming posts are both activities that fall into the first category of the rhyming skills because both activities are made to listen for and identify whether or not the words rhyme.

Once your child can tell you whether or not words rhyme (skill #1), you want to practice activities that will help them to create rhymes. 

Click on the link for an activity for skill #2:

Create A Rhyme

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Number Sets 1-10; Tower Matching

Today’s activity is for all the little ones who have just started to practice counting skills but who are still not quite ready to use number symbols to represent each “set” yet.  Learning to count one object at a time is the first skill of meaningful counting experiences to be mastered before incorporating number symbols.

When I say number symbols I just mean the actual numbers 1, 2, 3, etc.

So today you are going to use cubes (blocks, or LEGOs will work too), but the key is using materials that can be stacked on top of each other to make “towers” that are all the same height when using the same number of blocks.  So if all you have are LEGOs you may need to sort them into groups that are the same size and use only one group. 

  1. You are going to build pairs of towers, some that are the same, and some that are different.  So you might build one pair of towers that have 5 cubes each, and one pair of towers that has one tower of 5 and one tower of 3. 
  2. You are going to hide all of your tower pairs together under cups, bowls, baskets, or some other non-transparent item in your house.
  3. You are going to ask them to flip one of the bowls over, and decide whether or not the pairs of towers match.  You are watching to learn what techniques your child uses to figure it out.  Does he line them up to see if they are the same height? Does he count each tower?  Does he count the correct number for each tower? Etc.
  4. If he/she gets it right or wrong ask “How can you tell?”  Your child’s answers will tell you a lot about whether or not he understands these number concepts or not. 
  5. Have your child draw a picture afterwards of the game. “Can you draw a picture of us playing this game so I can keep it in my memory book of all the fun things we did together?”  The Binder of FunWork post is a great way to keep these learning milestones.  Don’t forget to write the date and some of the things your child said when learning this on the back of their artwork. 🙂
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