Who Doesn't Like a Box?

Anyone who has a child has probably experienced their child playing for hours with a box, rather than the toy that came in it.  Boxes, like balls, blocks and sticks, are open ended materials.  With imagination, a box can be anything.

I've been inspired by Tom Bedard's box play ideas for children, which you can see on his blog, tomsensori.blogspot.com.  His axioms of sensory motor play really ring true, so over the course of the last year I have tried to incorporate more of this kind of play into our school days.  The children love it, and consistently return to this kind of play, so I believe it feeds a need in them.

This week I was gifted a rather marvelous set of boxes that fit within each other.  I decided to make a creation, and to document the process.  Many times I'll make my creations with the kids around me, because I believe they can learn by observing the process, they love to make suggestions and help make decisions, and because I want them to see that tools are not just for men.  This time the kids were out for the weekend, and I didn't want to wait to play with the boxes, so I went ahead and created.

My materials, spread out for easy visibility and access, and no need to keep the knife or anything else out of the way of kiddos.

 I decided to put large plastic bottles inside the big box, to support the inner box.  Since they were going to be there, I made them accessible from the outside.  The bottle openings were jammed into the holes I created, and I was even able to put the lids on with the bottles in place.

 I wanted to have upright tubes for the children to put the seeds in, but realized my tubes were much too tall for the children to reach.  I cut the cardboard tube in half.

 Looking down inside the box.  You can see the plastic bottles, and small end supports on top of them.  I had to raise the inner box a little, so seeds dropped down the tubes could clear the plastic bottles rather than becoming stuck.

 I taped the tubes in place from the top and the bottom - the holes in this layer were almost the perfect size for the tubes!

 Ta-da!  90 minutes and 12 yards of duct tape later, I had a really cool box, with several different possible configurations.

 My 14 year old son and I "tested" it out - and found that too many seeds bounced out of the holes on the sides.  By watching carefully, he realized that the angled corners of the plastic bottles were pointed right at the openings.  We added a duct tape "curtain", which worked beautifully to contain the seeds.

 On Monday morning the real testers arrived.  It was a hit!

 You might wonder if preschool kiddos could really learn anything through this sensory play, or if it is just for fun.  This kiddo scooped 2 containers of seeds, and pronounced them "equal".  He then added another scoop of seeds to one container, and said they weren't equal anymore.

 There is a lot of fine motor development happening here, as the children carefully pick up beans both by scooping and with a pincer grasp.  The children have to communicate and cooperate as they share access to the box.  As they scoop and pour seeds into different containers, the children are beginning to develop a sense of  volume, using words like more and less as they compare quantities of seeds. We definitely practice cleaning up afterwards!

This box has been played with almost constantly this week.  Eventually the kiddos will tire of this configuration, and choose it less often.  That's when I'll know it is time to change out something - perhaps the box configuration, or the medium they're playing with, or even the tools available to scoop.  Who doesn't like a box?!

Penguins and piggies and pizza, oh my!

There are SOOOO many things that start with the letter P and are relevant to preschool kiddos, that we had a very busy week!  We started out by reading about penguins, both fiction and non-fiction, then made a cute penguin craft. These are parent penguins, keeping their chicks warm on their feet.  We displayed them all together, in a (reused styrofoam) rookery, just like real penguins.  We learned lots of great vocabulary including chicks, rookery and brood pouch.

One of our penguins books was Five Little Penguins Sliding On The Ice, by Steve Metzger.  We had fun acting it out!

For more penguin counting fun, check out this adorable Penguin poem on my blog, and available at my TeachersPayTeachers store.

It was also fun to practice being a penguin parent, carrying our "eggs" on our feet to keep them off the cold ice.  We decided daddy penguins definitely had an advantage, having a brood pouch to help keep their eggs on their feet!  Some of the kiddos pushed their "egg" up their pants leg, to make their own brood pouch!  I found the idea here.

One sunny morning we all took turns planting peas in the veggie garden.  It's quite barren out there now, but as spring approaches, peas will be one of the first plants to germinate.  As we planted we talked about what the seeds will need to help them grow: water, soil, and sunshine.  We pushed each seed into a small hole, and covered them with a little soil - they germinate in the dark, then grow up into the light.

On Wednesday, we made "pigs in a blanket" for lunch - yum!

Later in the day I had my kindergarteners plan out, write and illustrate an experience story about our cooking.  They were very proud to read it to their parents and their friends, and I saw some of their nicest handwriting!

We had a lot of choices for our hand print art this week!  I found Pete the Cat here,

the pirate here,

 this penguin here,

the peacock here,

the polar bear here,

and Pigeon here.  I love them all!

Of course, if we're talking about the letter P, we have to make pizza!  This year I let each child make their own pizza on an English muffin.  They spread the sauce, chose their toppings, and put their pizza together just the way they wanted it.  Look at all these tasty ingredients!

 Ready for the oven...

 Ready to eat!  Yum!  The kiddos not only gobbled up their pizza, but also ate salad and corn.

While some children were making their real pizzas with me, others made their P for pizza craft with Ms. Julie.  They added pepperoni, pineapple and peppers, all to fit with our letter P theme.  We made the lower case p for penguins earlier in the week, and each child chose 1, 2, 3, or 4 penguins to go on their pink or purple p.  In the next picture, you can see the graph they made, showing how many penguins each child chose.  When we graph we talk about number, more than, less than, equal, greatest or most, and fewest or least, all good math vocabulary to develop.

 Just for fun, we played Papa's Pizza Topple, a toy left over from when my own kiddos were little.  To be successful in this balancing game the children have to place their pieces gently, and pay attention to which part of the pizza is heaviest; leaning down, and lightest; sticking up.

We also did a lot of puzzles this week.  I've written an entire blog on that - please scroll down if you'd like to read it.  This giant Winnie the Pooh puzzle was difficult, but we had to do Pooh bear activities, as January 17th is A.A. Milne's birthday, and Winnie the Pooh Day.

We read Pooh bear books, and snuggled with stuffed animals and puppets...

 ...and played Pooh bear toys, including bingo and a matching game.  For lunch we had peanut butter and honey sandwiches (yum!), and lots of fresh veggies from Rabbit's garden: corn, cauliflower, carrots, tomato, spinach and peas.

Our last fun P activity this week was painting on HUGE paper.  This paper was padding in a package I received earlier in the week, and saved for painting on.  Who says art supplies have to be new?  The kiddos had a blast doing extra large paintings, and reused the paper in the process. 

We had a great week, with lots of fun learning activities.  Next week, letter Q.  Perhaps we'll even have a visit from HRH The Queen!

Puzzles!

This morning I got out a pile of puzzles, and everyone was excited to have a "new" toy available, so we did a lot of puzzles!  It may look like child's play, but the kiddos are learning so much as they work, and I want to share some of what I saw and heard.

As she worked on the Lion King puzzle, this sweetie asked me, and then answered her own question, "Where is Nala's tail?  It's behind!"  She knew that 2 lions needed 2 tails, and since only one was visible, the other must be hidden. 

 

 I saw children cooperating, working together to do puzzles.  The pieces at the bottom of this particular puzzle are tricky for a puzzle with only a few pieces, and it was giving these girls some trouble.  One said, "The green is what's stopping it from fitting."  She identified the problem, and what was causing it, an important step in problem solving.

Some of these kiddos are kindergarteners, and routinely do much more challenging puzzles.  This one found a way to make the easy puzzles more interesting, "I'm teaching R___ to do puzzles," she told me.

Obvious skills like spacial reasoning and problem solving, and social skills like cooperating and teaching each other aren't the only skills practiced while doing puzzles.  One of the kiddos was counting the pieces of her puzzle, and this little guy started singing Chicken Count, a song we've learned from youtube.com.  On another round with this puzzle I also observed him pointing to the numerals in the puzzle and saying, "Zero, one, two, three, four... five!"

Another child was putting numbers to 20 in order, then held up the number 20 and told me, "Tomorrow's that day."  She's close, today is the 16th.

 "I will help you.  Which one looks tricky?  This one?"  O___ moved the troublesome piece.  "It's not tricky any more."  As the picture came together, these girls started singing "Over the field we go, laughing all the way."

 Then a minute later, "We're almost done!  We kept going with it.  We did it!  Let's do a different one!"  Perseverance - now that's an important skill to learn!

There's also plenty of pretend play happening, because, with children, there's almost always pretend play!  This kiddo was "driving" the vehicles and saying, "Nee-nar, nee-nar".

This was also a teaching time, as I worked with children to help them figure out what they needed to do.  Here we've turned all the pieces over, and I asked the child, "Where does the head go, bottom, middle or top?" 

We talk about making the picture make sense, and that things the same color may go together.  Using picture clues to do puzzles now will help the children use picture clues later in their reading, and they need to know that things (mostly) are supposed to make sense.

 Another clue we can use is shape, this kiddo was looking for a rounded piece to match the outline drawing on this puzzle. 

Here are some of the other things I heard the children say while working on puzzles this morning:

EF: Where does this one go?  OE: Got it!

CH: You want to play with this puzzle?  JP: I already did it.  CH: You want to do that puzzle?

EF: I did it!  We did it!  We did the not easy one!

BM: Pretend I take all your pieces while you are napping.  CB: No! Don't!

NP: Can I do the train puzzle? (He took a few pieces out, and put them back in.)  I did it!

JP: I put the whole thing together!

Are there other skills the children can learn as they do puzzles and games - oh yes!  Today I saw them using shape and color, simple logic, singing, making connections to prior knowledge, cooperating, taking turns, imagining, persevering, and helping each other.  Child's play?  Oh yes, very important child's play indeed!

Rainy Day Treasure Hunt/ Observation Walk

I took the kiddos outside for a treasure hunt, to see what natural treasures we could find and to run off a little steam after being stuck inside for a couple of rainy days.  Here's some of what they discovered!

A spider web in the grass.  What keen observation!

 A speckled leaf that's different from all the others.

 A tiny piece of an evergreen, probably from a Christmas tree.

 All the roses were dead and droopy, frozen earlier in the week.

 "The leaves are sparkly!" with rain drops.

 The tree trunks were wet on one side, and almost dry on the other.

 More "sparkly" leaves, wet with rain drops.  A couple of kiddos caught the drops on their fingers and tasted them.

 Our jack-o-lantern pumpkins are disintegrating.  The kiddos poke at them, to see how mushy they've become.

 One of our cabbages is forming a head!

The world is so interesting through the eyes of a child!