Letter Y, oh why?

 I've been pretty enthusiastic about most of our letters, finding a lot of different learning activities to engage the children for each one.  Letter Y is stumping me.  Perhaps it's because there's not a whole lot of things that start with Y, or maybe it's because we studied Y the same week that I took 3 separate groups to the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens to see the Butterflies in the Garden exhibit.  Maybe we were all just a little worn out, as it was also the week before Spring Break.  No matter what, Y got the short end of the stick.  Literally.

 

We searched the back yard for sticks shaped like the letter y,  and the pictures we took with our sticks will go into our abc photo albums.

I've mentioned our abc photo albums many times, but I don't think I've taken pictures of them to share before.  Each week, one of our activities is making one of these pages.  I have 2 different versions - the stamps, stickers and pictures version, for most of the children, and a word writing page for the kindergarteners who are able to sound out whole words.  Each child has their own album of these pages.  On the facing pages in our books, I mount a picture of the child/author, doing one of our letter of the week activities.  The children love to look at pictures of themselves, so they often sit and go through their books, reviewing letters and sounds as they do. 

Last year I only had a yak for our letter y hand print, but Ms. Julie came up with a terrific idea to make yachts!  I know my kiddos don't have experience with yaks or yachts, and I want what we do here to be meaningful, so we looked up photos of yachts, and a short video of yaks.  We decided that yaks are basically hairy cows!

 So what other y words can the kids relate to?  Yellow of course, and also yukky and yarn (I'm an avid crocheter).  We made a concoction of half glue and half water, and had the children drench short pieces of yarn in the yukky stuff, then glue it to their lower case y craft.  It was yukky alright!  It's kind of funny that so many of the children didn't want to get their fingers in the glue mixture, but that when we go outside they dig around for pillbugs and peach seeds - and I have to keep them out of the compost when they're doing it!

 Finally, here are examples of our letter Y crafts.

Do you think by next year we'll find more Y activities?  Oh, yes!

Our Morning Routine

Today I'd like to share our morning routine with you.  My school is in my home, and I've created a combination preschool, kindergarten, and home child-care.  Children arrive any time after 7:30am, we eat breakfast around 8 am, and by 8:30 we're ready to learn.  This is how we start the structured learning part of each day.

We sing and dance!  Children love to move, and they learn best when they are moving, listening, looking at and joining in with engaging activities, so we start each day with 20-30 minutes of active learning with youtube.com.  I've created a play list for each week of the school year, so it's super easy for me to pull it up on the computer.  Each playlist starts with something energetic!  Here the kiddos are enjoying I Like To Move It, from Madagascar. 

 I always include songs that focus on the letter of the week, and our favorites are the StoryBot songs, and Sesame Street Podcasts.  There is always something about counting, and most weeks I try to include some Spanish language activities - El Perro Y El Gato is a fantastic, kid appropriate series.
Other, really useful channels to find learning songs include Heidi Songs, Harry Kindergarten Music, Dr. Jean and The Learning Station.

When singing and dancing is finished, the kiddos sit on the carpet, and I draw them back together with an alphabet activity.  Some days we recite Chicka Chicka Boom Boom as I point to the letters on my Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree, other days we chant the alphabet, and sounds.  Here the kids are pretending to eat an apple as they say, "A is for apple, a a a."

 D is for dog, d d d...

 Their favorite is V is for volcano, v v v, because they use big voices and big arms.  Even sitting down, we're incorporating music and movement.

 Next we stand up, ready to jump and count to 20, and to follow along as one of us points to the number line.  We jump to emphasize the move to the next number, as working on 1-1 correspondence is important at this stage.  Of course, jumping also gets our wiggles out, and even younger children who may not be able to say all the numbers to 20, can jump and participate, whilst hearing the numbers, and perhaps learning their sequence.

I ask 3 kiddos to tell me something we have zero of (lions, sharks, and unicorns today), and then let everyone else whisper their idea to a friend.  Then we jump and count!

 We sit down quickly when we're done, so we can count by 5's to 100, raising 5 toes as we say each number. 

 We sit up straight and put 10 fingers up in the air for each number when we count by 10's to 100.

 Then we quickly stand up, and reach high into the air to be rocket ships, and count down. 10, 9, 8...

 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...

 0, blast off!

Next we sing a counting to ten song in Spanish.  I wish I could provide a link to it, it's one I learned from Sesame Street a looooong time ago, but I can't find it on youtube.  It might seem like a small thing to include in our routine, but I know it's worthwhile.  Just last week a parent asked me if I had been teaching her son to count in Spanish, because he was walking around at home singing the Spanish numbers song!  Music really does help children (and adults) remember things!  

While we're standing up we do the pledge to the flag, standing tall and proud, showing respectful body language.  I made up a little rhyme to help the kiddos remember the names of our flag:

The Red, White and Blue,

Old Glory too,

The Stars and Stripes,

We respect you!

We sit back down, and look out the window, and on the count of 3, everyone whispers what our weather looks like, so we can graph it.  Thr child in the next picture is signing "equal", because we've had 0 snowy days and 0 rainy days so far this month.

I ask questions about our graph, from easy (How many ___ days?) to challenging (How many more ___ than ____?)  We always notice what has the most, and what has the fewest!

The last thing we do is look at the calendar.  I use a picture pattern for the calendar numbers, and we always start several days back, and count-on to find out what number we need.  We don't start counting at 1 every time, because counting-on is an important pre-addition skill, and one preschoolers might not otherwise experience.  We say the pattern too, starting several days back, and continuing the pattern to discover which picture we need.  This month our calendar numbers have shamrocks on one side, and rainbows on the other. 

We finish by singing and dancing to Dr. Jean's Macarena Months song, and the Days of the Week song.  With that last dance, the children are ready to sit down for a quick story and lesson, or whatever we have planned for the morning.

As you can see, our "Preschool" time is very active, and very musical.  We include a lot of things!  Over 20 years of teaching, I've found that daily repetition is key to students remembering.

Next time I'll tell you more about what comes after our preschool routine!

Developing Mathematical Thinking Part 3

This week I presented a training to a group of home based child care providers about developmentally appropriate learning activities for children.  One of the areas we covered was mathematical learning, which you can tell is near and dear to my heart, as this is the third post about it on my blog!  You can see the other posts about developing mathematical thinking here and here.

So what kind of skills are appropriate to teach to young children?  What do they need to know?  Here in Texas we have Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) to guide us.  Depending upon where you live, your state or country may have slightly different guidelines, but here is a link that will let you see the Texas guidelines for infants, toddlers and three year olds, as well as those for prekindergarten through 12th grade. 

Basic skills for preschooler and kindergarteners include counting whole numbers, using patterns, sorting, shape recognition, measurement (longer/shorter, bigger/smaller), making and using graphs, and problem solving. 

Here are some of the ideas and materials that I shared.  There are so many other wonderful materials and ideas available, I strongly recommend Pinterest.com as a great source of ideas, and some of these ideas are ones I have borrowed from other teachers over the years.  Thank you to all the fantastic teachers who generously share their ideas, so we can all benefit from them!

Materials for sorting.  Many things can be sorted more than one way.  I've bought my materials from a lot of different places, and for a lot of different price ranges. 

Here are two examples of super inexpensive sorting materials: erasors, and baby shower decorations from the dollar store.  Note the sorting tray - it's a reused cheese tray.  The erasors are stored in a plastic box that originally came full of rice, and the baby items container came with cookies in it.

Don't forget natural materials!  Do you have oak trees?  Pattern with acorns and leaves.  Live some place stony?  Line rocks up by size.  How about feathers, sticks, pinecones... even seeds from your fruit and veggies.  Look around you, the possibilities are endless, and often free.

Think creatively!  What is my sorting rule for these transportation beads?  Try starting a sort, and let your children try to guess your sorting rule.  They can add one item at a time, and you can tell them if it follows the rule, or not... when they understand the game, let them do the sort, and you take turns guessing their rule. 

This is another inexpensive item, beads.  I've made up patterns with the beads, on fishing line - because that is easy for the kiddos to thread through the beads.  To make this a reusable patterning game, I looped the line several times through the last bead.  The children can add more beads to continue the pattern, and then pull them back off when done, but the base of the pattern stays in place.

Another simple material that you may already have on hand is buttons.  Children love to sort and play with small items!  I went through my button collection and created baggies that work for Venn Diagrams, keeping the buttons and labels in small zipper baggies - so they are easy to change out.
**** Please supervise all children when they are using materials that could be choking hazards! ****

If you can't afford to buy fancy sorting trays, or maybe you just don't have the space to store them, why not create your own on poster board?  I made the giant Venn Diagram poster by tracing a large plastic lid, and the graphing grids with a yard stick and marker.  Super easy!

Graphing is another easy and quick math activity that the children love.  They have to identify their name to put it on the graph, and working with all the names of their classmates helps them learn to read them all.  I made up some generic titles for my graphs, and reuse them with different column headings.  We also reuse the children's name cards, so there is very little to prepare new each time.  Here are some ideas for open ended questions that you can easily change out, and that you could fit with whatever theme you are teaching:

- Which do you prefer _____ or _____ or _____?
- Do you like _____?
- Does your name have _____? (letter __ or  # of letters)
- What is your favorite _____?
- Do you have a ____? (pet / sister / swing set / ___)
- Are you wearing _____? (buttons / zippers / long sleeves / yellow / hair bows / etc.)
- Do you like to _____? (swim / draw / dance / clean up / etc.)
- Are you taller than _____?
- What color are your _____? (eyes / shoes / hair / teddy bear etc.)
- Would you like to _____? (hold a big bug?  climb a mountain?  ride a zebra? etc. )
- Is your arm/leg/shoe longer/shorter/wider than a ______?
- Roll a dice.  What number did you roll?

Don't forget games and puzzles!  Rolling dice, moving the correct number of spaces, taking turns, matching - these all help develop important skills, and the children think they are just "playing". 

Many people who take care of young children have babies as well as toddlers and preschoolers, so they need to offer math learning activities that meet the needs of the older children whilst also being baby safe.  Here are a few possibilities: sort snap lock beads by color or shape, match socks, match clothes pins to a cardboard game board.

Magnetic toys are fun to play with on inexpensive baking trays... dollar store again!

Your materials do not have to be limited to a single use!  These transportation counters are easy to sort by color and shape, but I wanted to incorporate measurement with non-standard units too, so I created measurement mats.  On each mat, I show which piece to measure with, and drew lines equal in length to various numbers of the sorting item.  The children line up the pieces, count them, and then put it away, leaving the items and mats ready for the next child.

Here are some more inexpensive items: buttons, beads, and gems from the dollar store.  There are many ways to sort or use each one.  If you run out of ideas, try challenging the children to help you come up with new ways to use them! 

Remember, mathematics is fun!  I hope you enjoy these, and many other activities with your children.

Spring break week

This week was spring break, so we did a little bit of everything, and had a lot of fun.  Here's a sampling.  Magnet play and exploration:

 Painting... Mondrian style.  The kiddos placed strips of black tape on their paper, then filled in the resulting rectangles with primary colors, and trimmed the tape.

 We tried a new painting technique that I saw on teachpreschool.org.  I added liquid watercolors to bubbles, and the children blew them at paper on an easel.  Some of the kiddos had trouble finding the right distance from the paper to allow bubbles to form, but not get away.  We'll be trying this super cute idea again next week, when we have more friends here.  (Some of our friends were on vacation for spring break.)

 We planted more seeds in pots made from upcycled tp tubes.  When the pots were full, we put them in mini-green houses made from plastic salad containers.

 The plastic containers work beautifully to keep the moisture in the containers.  Here are cucumber seeds we started a couple of weeks ago!

 One of our friends had a birthday this week, so she chose two friends to help her make cupcakes, so we could celebrate.

 Can you tell how proud she is of her cupcakes, and how pleased she is to be celebrating?

 Of course, sometimes we just need to play and pretend.

 These kiddos were making "fire" and squirting it out with "hoses".  They also tried making hoses of specific colors, yellow for lemonade, green for limeade...

 Playing outside in the sunshine is always fun!

 We were lucky enough to have "milkshakes" for free in the backyard this week.  These blocks were just scraps of wood left over from a construction project, but at my house they are milkshakes, cell phones, computers, and anything else the children can imagine.

 Talk about imagination - these two were sure they saw alligators in the creek!

 We enjoyed a field trip to River Legacy Science Center on Friday, to see an opossum.  First we checked out the cool science learning activities in the science center.

 Then we got to visit Lucy the Opossum, right up close!

 The staff had a fun opossum craft for the kiddos to assemble afterwards.

 At the park and playground we enjoyed a picnic lunch, then played on the fantastic playground.

There is always something fun to do and to learn about!  Next week, letter Z.  Can you guess where we'll go for our field trip?