The other day I made a simple template for a zoo trace and color to tote along in our wagon for down times, I am going to re-make it using my own clipart soon, but for now it looks like this:
Well, the VERY next day we were going to Boo at the Zoo so I wanted to mix it up and I had already made seasonal clipart so I toted this one along in the wagon…
I decided to make it a combined printable even though Halloween is right around the corner.
I thought you might want to tote this one around tomorrow on a walk and make it a scavenger hunt for decorations in the neighborhood so I figured I would go ahead and give ya this printable today! If you don’t use it this year, bookmark TheMommyTeacher and you can always keep it for next year !
Let’s face it, learning how to read isn’t always the most exciting thing in the world, especially when you are practicing fluency with words that do not even exist (a common practice to gauge phonemic awareness and blending sounds).
James’ teacher sent home a new fluency folder that includes lists of non-sensical (made-up) CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant), sight and high-frequency words. Reading these lists can be absolutely BO-RING for both the reader (your child) and the listener (most often, you, Mommy Teacher). It’s also super easy to get overwhelmed by unfamiliar words in these early reading stages, so, how can we make reading fun and enjoyable???
Here are 5 inexpensive and cheap tools that you can use:
1. TRACKING FINGERS: My son’s fluency folder came equipped with a rubber witch’s finger to use to follow the words left-right, top-bottom. (I specifically wrote this post right before Halloween so that you can go pick some up at your local dollar store before the 31st! You’re welcome!) As soon as James hopped in the car from carpool he was pulling out his new fluency folder and showing us how to use his tracking finger… and now my 4-year old wants one too!
2. PUNCTUATION SWITCH: Take a popsicle stick and draw an exclamation point on one end, switch it around and draw a question mark on the other end. Read the story (or even just a list of words) by adding different emphases at the end of phrases. A simple change in intonation can make for an interesting read with even the most boring of texts – or it can make a silly book even sillier! (A twist on this is to sing the text… one of my son’s favorites that I catch him doing even when he doesn’t have an audience listening.)
3. CATERPILLAR CHART: When I was teaching, I used a caterpillar chart to keep track of how many books we read throughout the year. I wrote the title and author of each book we read on a different circular body segment of the caterpillar. By the end of the year, our caterpillar’s body went half way around the classroom!
You can use a similar, smaller version at home by using stickers. Start off by using a sticker for every word your child can read by him/herself, and then move up to simple books. With your younger child, you can just keep track of the number of books you read to him/her. Set a number goal of number of words or books you need to reach before your caterpillar can turn into a butterfly!
“To help my caterpillar grow and grow,
I must read at least 1 book (or new word) a day.
Once he gets to be 10 stickers long,
He will grow wings and fly away.”
4. WHISPER PHONES: I am pretty sure Jessica has written a post about these before, but it’s always a fun reminder for next time you are at your local home improvement store. Grab a PVC pipe and some 90 degree elbow fittings, cut it down to about 6 inches, and you have a great reading tool! Teachers use these in classrooms all the time for young readers to hear themselves read out loud without making a lot of noise. With these phones, even the quietest whisper is audible to only the reader.
5. MAGNIFYING GLASS/GLASSES: Grab some goofy glasses or a magnifying glass and all of a sudden reading became a game! Much like the tracking finger and whisper phones from above, this reading tool just makes reading a little more fun… well, to your pre-schooler or school-aged child… I, personally, don’t get it 😉 If you have some old sunglasses, punch out the lenses so your child can have some new, funky eyewear while being studious!
What tools do you use to make reading fun for your child? Share with us on Facebook or comment below!
When we were “Boo’d” the other day, we got some stickers in our little surprise basket that I wanted to do something with, but couldn’t quite put my finger on what that should be.
Then, for some unknown reason…. the following activity popped into my brain….I turned the stickers into a “heads or tails” game with just 5 SIMPLE materials: 2 sheets of stickers, one piece of paper, a marker/sharpie, and a coin bigger than the smallest sticker on your sheet.
I placed a jack-o-lantern sticker on one side of the coin, a ghost sticker on another side of the coin,
and then made a SIMPLE sorting sheet by drawing a line down the middle of the page and one at the top. I place a sticker on either side of the sorting sheet.
I explained to Sean Patrick that we would flip the coin to see if it landed on heads (the jack-o-lantern) or tails (the ghost) and whatever it landed on would get to put that sticker on the chart under the matching sticker.
The next day we played again using the sticker activity printable I made on the computer and I liked it better because it was easier to do 🙂
I showed him one example and then he took over and got the hang of it.
I decided to make a printable for this in case you wanted to download it and save it in your files for any teachers, homeschoolers, or for all you organized moms.
As you can see, this halloween printable has other images in case you have different stickers and it has candy corn images in case you want to sort your autumn mix candy instead. We sorted the candy corn and had a blast…. the dog was a little jealous!
He had to color each space the matching color before he could eat each candy corn, and he got a little carried away at the end… maybe it was the sugar high.
Mommy wrote the numbers after he counted each side.
You can also use the other images in this printable to make playing cards for memory or Halloween Go Fish.
If you have younger kids that you would like to do this activity with, you can simply have them sort these items without any of the bells and whistles. For the sticker activity, Just say “Let’s sort the groups of stickers. Can you put ALL of the jack-o-lanterns on this side of the chart under the jack-o-lantern and ALL of the ghosts on this side of the page under the ghost?”
In the spirit of Halloween, I wanted to do an art project with my 4-year-old while my 6-year-old was at school. My middle child loves and cherishes this one-on-one time with Mommy. Jess’ post on Monday inspired us to make our own Jack-O-Lanterns, but I had a different objective in mind.
I was also inspired by a “find the differences” book I was reading with Leyson that has two near-identical pictures side by side, but with subtle differences. Each page asks you to “find (x-amount of) differences” which may be as simple as the omission of an object in the picture or a change of color, shape, size or placement of an object.
The objective of our activity was for my son to be able to both point out and fix the differences between my picture and his picture to make them the same, and also to recreate the picture I created… in this case, a pumpkin.
Materials needed: construction paper, scissors, maybe some glue after the activity 🙂
Mommy Prep: Using orange construction paper, I cut out two large pumpkin shapes, and lots of different sized rectangles*, triangles, circles, squares and other various shapes with brown, yellow and black paper.
*I cut out 4 different types of rectangle stems to bring in some vocabulary to our activity: short, long, thick, thin
Leyson first had to close his eyes (or cover his face with a blanket because I learned that I can’t trust him to keep his eyes closed) and count to twenty while I arranged the different shapes to make a face on my pumpkin. Apparently, counting to twenty now means omitting numbers 14 and 19, so we will be working on that again soon.
I started off with a simple face. Two circles for eyes, a circle for a nose, a fat, brown rectangle and a U-shape for a smiley mouth.
When he got to 20, he pulled the blanket off of his face, he had to use the remaining shapes to make his pumpkin look just like my pumpkin.
To make the project more challenging in other rounds, I layered some of the shapes such as using smaller circles on top of larger circles for the eyes.
The most difficult part of the activity was when I used only triangles to make a face and he had to figure out which direction the triangles were facing. It’s harder than it looks!
We experimented with all the different things we could learn from making pumpkins:
Feelings/Emotions: We made happy pumpkins, and sad pumpkins, and angry pumpkins, and scared pumpkins… and talked about why each pumpkin was feeling the way they were feeling.
Counting/More or Less: Sometimes Mommy’s pumpkin had 4 teeth, sometimes it had more or less.
Compare and Contrast: “What is different about the nose on your pumpkin and the nose on my pumpkin?” “Do our pumpkins have the same shaped mouth?”
Vocabulary: Colors, shapes, sizes, parts of the face
Spacial Awareness: “Are the eyes close together or far apart?” “If you put the eyes in the middle of the pumpkin, can we fit a nose and a mouth too?”
Phonemic Awareness & Writing: We segmented the sounds in pumpkin /p/ /u/ /m/ /p/ /k/ /i/ /n/… which is pretty hard to do when your child pronounces it like “po’kin” but we wrote the real word on the back of our project.
When you are finished the activity, grab some glue so you can add some Halloween decor to your house!
Who needs to buy decorations from the store, when with a little glue and tape you can make your house ready for any holiday?!
Recently in my mom group we were talking about how we are more likely to pin, than to DO the activities with our kids.
I admitted that this was a tendency of mine too but that I had recently committed to make a habit to plan on DOING at least one activity from my Pinterest boards a day… which may mean that I need to pick one the night before to make sure I have what I need.
The activity I’m going to share today isn’t one that I had on my Pinterest Board “October Activities” but it will be added today because it was always one of my favorite activities in the classroom and I had fun doing this activity with Sean Patrick.
I read this book so I could show the kids a jack-o-lantern and we could talk about the colors, shapes, and function of a jack-o-lantern
(If you do not participate in halloween you can still make this craft asa Fall pumpkin).
First, I pulled an orange sheet of construction paper, a brown sheet of construction paper, a black sheet of construction paper, a yellow sheet of construction paper, a white crayon, and a glue stick…. these materials can vary (if you don’t have one of those colors then COLOR a white sheet of computer paper (that is what I did for the stem of the pumpkin).
Yellow piece of construction paper not pictured.
Next, I drew a pumpkin shape with my white crayon onto the black construction sheet of paper. I drew triangle eyes, a nose, and a mouth that you can fill in with yellow construction paper or leave blank. Great time to talk about shapes 🙂
Then, together the kids and I tore the orange sheet into lots of pieces, and we used the glue stick to cover the inside of the shape on everything that we wanted to be orange.
And, we covered the pumpkin (or jack-o-lantern when you glue around the facial features).
Finally, we filled in the stem with brown, the facial features with yellow, and hung it up on our playroom blinds with a clothespin to take pride in our Jack-o-lantern! (If I did it again I would start with the yellow facial features then do the orange).
We had fun, we accomplished something together, and they “worked out” their little fingers which is always a great way to prime them for writing.
This craftivity would be best for a four and up child in my personal opinion, but we didn’t finish this in one sitting and mommy helped A LOT!
After sharing one of these pics on my Instagram, a mommy teacher friend of mine took this approach….
And I LOVE LOVE LOVE that she used what she had, she made an activity geared toward her girl’s interests, and she inspired me to do this spin on the activity too! Thanks Allie!
