Can You Name This Children's Book?

Can you name the book this quote is from?  It's a lovely children's book by a popular author, fun to use when you're teaching about animals, or as a lead up to Mothers' Day.  Scroll down to see the title...



It's Does a Kangaroo Have a Mother, Too? by Eric Carle!  How do YOU like to use this one with your students?  Let me know in the comments!

These Awesome Tangrams Will Make Your Students LOVE math!

You're probably familiar with tangrams, the Chinese puzzle made with 7 shapes that form a square - and any number of other things.  They're fun for all ages, simple enough for a child to use, and complex enough to challenge adults: truly a puzzle for children ages 3 - 103.

When I first introduce anything to my students, I like to allow them plenty of time to explore and discover on their own.  This is something I was urged to do way back in teacher training, and 25 years teaching has reinforced.  It's amazing what students will come up with when you let them explore and play!

Next I display a big tangram shape.  I ask students to tell me what they notice.  This is when I usually hear the names of the shapes, some words about size, and there's almost always someone who refers to the "diamond" shape, which is just the square turned onto a corner.  Being a tiny bit silly (who me?) I ask the children what my name is - Ms. Paula.  I then strike various silly poses and ask again - and each time my name is still the same.  It's the same with the square - turn it any which way you like, it's still a square!

Another great word and concept that comes up at this time is parallel.  For most of the children I've taught, that's a new word.  We look around the room for things that are parallel: the sides of our desks, the lines in the ceiling tiles, bookshelves, and more.  Although this is a brief mini lesson, only lasting a minute or so, I carry it over into the rest of the week by noticing or asking children to notice parallel lines around the school.  Pretty soon they have that concept firmly in place.

The next thing I like to do is to hide my tangram, and provide each child with their own tangram and ask then to make me a square.  I bet you can picture which child in your class will be a smarty and hold up the small square!

I challenge them to make a square, and it doesn't take long for someone to use 2 equal sized triangles to do it.  The tangram set includes 2 small triangles and 2 big triangles, so there's more than 1 way to do it - I love telling my students to keep trying and look for another way, it's just the sort of challenge they're eager to figure out!

It's very rare to have a student use all 7 pieces to make a square, in fact, most adults I've met can't figure it out.  I give the children a few minutes to try, and when I sense they're ready, I begin to give them clues.  I show them how to use the 2 big triangles to make half of the square - it's helpful to define the space where the rest of the pieces will go.

A few minutes later I add the square,

then the medium triangle. 

Eventually all the children get it.

That's my introduction to tangrams - next comes the part I like the best!  I show students pictures that can be made with tangrams, and challenge them to try to make them.  You can find hundreds of tangram puzzle shapes with a quick internet search, or for simplicity, I have a variety of these puzzles available in my TeachersPayTeachers store.

It's ideal to have both the puzzle and the answer key available, because many students will be challenged to simply rotate and match the shapes, while others will relish the challenge of figuring it all out.  I put them back to back in a page protector, so students can easily flip and check.

Don't have tangrams in your classroom yet, and don't have a budget for them?  No problem!  Download this free print

out, and either cut them ahead of time, or have students cut out their own.  It will save you a lot of confusion if you print them on different colored paper, so students don't mix up their pieces with a neighbor!  5-6 colors is enough - just use what you have available.

I hope you and your students enjoy exploring tangrams together! 

Slugs, Snails, A Puppy Dog Tale, and What Things Are Made Of

We had some rain Wednesday evening, so when I was out with my dogs on Thursday morning, I wasn't too surprised to see a snail slithering along on its silvery slime trail.  I thought the kiddos at story time might be interested, and I had a spare plastic bag with me, so I picked it up and continued on my way.  Not 100 feet further along, I found a slug.  What a great opportunity for the children to compare a slug and a snail - so into the baggie it went too.

Back home I rescued a large plastic food container from the recycling bin, added some spinach leaves, and put the snail and slug in their new, temporary home, and off we went to the library.
Our plan for the day didn't involve slugs or snails, but young children are scientists, always up for something interesting to investigate!

This week we read books with an engineering theme, of children constructing and creating to make "wonderful things".  Our follow up was an engineering experience: deconstructing things!  We offered a lovely assortment of old electric and electronic items that had seen better days: broken radios, hair dryers, calculators, toys, toasters, computers and keyboards, some donated by our library patrons, some from staff, and still more from a local thrift shop. We offered real tools, and asked our families to support their children in exploring what is inside of all our gadgets.

The children used screw drivers... 

...pliers...

...wire cutters...

...tape measures...

... and fingers to investigate.

The most popular items were probably the cassette and VCR tapes that were unwound and explored.

Children worked alone, in pairs or teams, with parents helping or watching, supervising to keep them safe, but allowing them to take the lead.

 We found all kinds of cool bits and bobs inside of stuff, and even saved some of it for a future "build it" session.

Afterwards, more than one parent mentioned that they were going to do this activity at home with their child the next time a gadget broke down.

So what about the slug and snail?  They were also a hit!  Some children wanted to look but definitely NOT TOUCH, others couldn't wait for a turn to hold them.

 If you look closely at the slug, you can even see its breathing pore on the side of it's body!

Next week we're going to have critters again.  Want a clue?  They'll be small and wiggly when they arrive, but after they eat and eat, they'll change into something beautiful.  Stay tuned for more learning fun!

Get Hopping with Frogs!

It is definitely spring - at least it is here in Northern California!  What could signal spring more than watching the landscape awaken from it's winter slumber?  The trees are greening, flowers blooming, and small things are skittering about in the garden again - so this week, we learned about frogs and their life cycles.

We enjoyed frog books - both fiction and non-fiction - and talked about a great big word: metamorphosis.  We sang and danced, and jumped like frogs too.  Then, of course, we had frog learning / play!  Here's a pond sensory bin, because regular readers (and people who know small children) know that our youngsters crave this kind of sensory input.  We had fish, frogs and ducks in the pond, and some insects sitting on the sides - frogs have to eat you know!  Do you see the little pieces of bubble wrap?  The clusters of bubble wrap represent frog eggs, and the long strands represent toad eggs.  Our friends enjoyed burying all the pond elements, perching frogs on lily pads, and carefully filling the fish and frog finger puppets with little blue pellets.

Since we were learning some real facts about frogs, including their life cycle, I made up a set of 3 part cards about the stages in frog development: eggs, tadpole, tadpole with legs, froglet, and frog.  The card with both word and picture is a control card, and the kiddos and parents looked at the words to figure out what each one said.  Then the students found the matching word card and matching picture card for each one.  We had lots of visual discrimination, looking at the length of words and which letters were in them, some sounding out, and a few frog noises too.  :-)  My favorite part was seeing the grins on the children's faces when they made a match, and realized that they can read!

The highlight of the week however was most definitely the guest frogs that came to spend the day with us!

 These African water frogs don't need rocks to sit on or anything, they're happy to swim about in a shallow container of water.  Our friends loved observing them with magnifying glasses, then drawing and writing about what they observed.  One of my friends noticed that the frogs had 4 toes on their front feet, and 5 on their back feet. 

 Other friends drew detailed pictures, right down to imaginary eggs.  (One little girl had a mommy frog and a daddy frog, plus a line of eggs.  I said maybe they were toads, since their eggs were in a long string.  She said no, they were special frogs.  Truly, they were!)

Do you think our friends were fascinated with the frogs?  That they wanted some seriously up close and personal time with them?  I'm just grateful no-one tested the (much discussed) theory of whether any of our frogs were princes in disguise, and in need of kissing!

As they left, the kiddos filled in a graph, telling whether they would like the chance to hold a frog or not.  The answer was a resounding 18 yes votes to 3 no votes.  I guess frogs are a hit!

Good news kiddos, we're not done with frogs yet!  In a few weeks, when there are tadpoles out, we're going to bring some in to visit again.  There is so much more to observe and learn!

Learning about insects

I don't know about where you live, but here in Texas, spring is just around the corner.  In the last 10 days our first daffodil has bloomed, and the trees are covered in leaf buds.  They aren't opening yet, but there is definitely a promise of spring in the garden.

Spring is best enjoyed outdoors, and it's a great time to learn about all the little critters that share our world with us. 

While some children are lucky enough to experience nature in a big way every day - I'm thinking farm or country life, or frequent nature walks - not everyone is. One kind of animal almost every child gets to see up close and personal is insects.  All those amazing things that creep, crawl, and all too often "bug" us!

I can't tell you how many times I've taken children to the zoo, only to have them all oo-ing and ah-ing over a beetle or a roly poly.  Sound familiar?  There's a couple of things that make all those little critters so appealing: they're tiny, and kids seem to love tiny things, they move, and that's pretty cool, and there are so many of them that you can almost always find one to check out!

Sometimes it's best not to touch.  I never could identify this particular caterpillar (if you know what it is, I'd love you to leave a comment!), but I try to have the children leave hairy, spiky caterpillars alone. 

I try to teach my kiddos to be safe, without being scared.  Bees are scary to a lot of children, whether because they've been stung, heard about stings, or because their family members are afraid.  Instead of teaching the children to fear them, I like to talk about how to be safe around them.  I teach the children that bees are attracted to bright colors - like flowers.  If our clothes are brightly colored, a bee may want to investigate us, even land on us.  But as soon as they realize we aren't sugary sweet like a flower, they'll fly off.

It's amazing to see the relief on children's faces when they realize that bees aren't out to get them!  We also talk about how a bee's stinger is part of her body, and that she dies if she stings something.  If we aren't a threat - batting at her or bothering her, then she most likely won't bother us either.

 If you have a garden area, even a small one, you probably get lots of insect visitors that you can observe.  Try giving children a pencil and a notepad and encouraging them to draw what they see. 

 Check out the aphids on our cabbage plants!  (Yes, it really is cabbage.  I let them go to flower, and then we watch the insects come, and we also like to nibble on the tasty cabbage flowers ourselves - although not if they're covered in aphids!)

It's no surprise to find ladybugs crawling on the cabbage, and we often find ladybug pupa too!

 We also learn about insects a lot of other places.  With books, of course, but also on field trips.  We saw "Critter Man" at one of our local libraries over the summer, and he had some SERIOUS insects to show us!

 This looks like a bee, but it isn't.  On a trip to the Botanic Gardens one of the children pointed out the "big bee" by the flowers.  I was able to snap a few shots, and upon closer inspection realized it was a moth.  Cool!

I've blogged before about seeing the butterfly exhibit at the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens, but I'll mention it again anyway.  If there is an opportunity for you to walk through a live butterfly exhibit, I hope you will - unless your children are scared of them.  Last year I took 3 different groups of children to the exhibit, and the first 2 groups LOVED it.  There were 2 kiddos in the last group who didn't like bugs getting too close to them, and it didn't matter that they were harmless and beautiful.  I should have prepared those kiddos better for our trip, or let them skip it.  20 years of teaching, and yes, there is definitely still more for me to learn!

 Can you see the butterfly on the left using its proboscis to suck up sweet juice from the fruit?  How cool is that?!

If you don't have a garden area, and you can't get to an exhibit, you might consider raising butterflies.  I've had a lot of luck with painted lady butterflies, which I've ordered from Insect Lore before.  There are other companies too, that's just the one I've used.  The first time I raised butterflies I had them in a cardboard box enclosure with plastic side windows.  Please, please, don't use that!  It wasn't big enough for the butterflies to fly in, so they'd launch from one side, crash into the windows, and unable to hold onto the slick plastic, slip to the floor.  They were able to climb up the corners, between plastic  sheets.  Sad!  After that I made a wire frame that fit inside a large plastic bin, and added a fine mesh cover.

 Our butterflies only stayed in it a few days before we released them, and it was a much better arrangement!

I've bragged about Bella's book club at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas before too.  Check out the fun insect learning activities we enjoyed at one of their story times.  If you are in or near Fort Worth, I highly recommend joining them!

Of course there are times when you need to take the learning inside, and if you are a teacher, there are times you need paper and pencil activities too.  

 If you are interested in insect themed arts and crafts, please check out my Insect board on Pinterest,

there are so many people with so many amazing ideas!

I've put many of my best insect photographs into a fun sentence-picture matching activity.  (It is $3.50 to buy from my TeachersPayTeachers store).

I used a lot of preprimer and primer words, and designed the activity for student success.  I tried it out with a former student, and as you can see from the look on her face, she was ecstatic  to discover she could really read all the sentences.  If you're working on early reading, or you have a junior entomologist on your hands, I hope you'll check it out!

If you'd like to see all my insect themed resources, just click here!

Have an awesome spring!