About a month ago, my friend Natalie (author of Our Berry Vine blog that I follow,) emailed several friends about "teaching our kids through play." She wanted us to compile some ideas for summer fun activities, projects, crafts...that could help us reinforce our kids' cognitive development. In otherwords, lets do something fun with a learning goal.
And I haven't really had a ton of time to think up and send out a lot of ideas...but today, I came up with one. And that's really how I roll anyway...I make a lot of this teaching/activity stuff as I go! :-)
This morning, on a whim, I decided on a fun little activity for us to do. The kids have been wanting to cut and paste things, and they've needed to practice using safety scissors. This project reinforces the alphabet, the order of the letters, phonics, uses observation skills, and helps develop fine motor. Here's what you need:
A piece of poster board, butcher paper or even construction paper
Old magazines
Safety scissors
Glue stick
Brightly colored tissue paper squares
Pencil
Poster paint
Allow children to peruse old magazines looking for letters of the alphabet. They need to be large enough to cut out. We went in order. Emma looked for "A," Alec looked for "B," etc. After finding each letter, ask "which letter comes next?" My kids would sing the alphabet song until they arrived at the next letter every single time. You can also ask "what sound does the A make?" if you want to reinforce phonics. It took us a good long while to find A-Z. I was pretty surprised that the kids stayed focused through all 26. I thought we may do like 10 letters and then pick up another day...but we made it through! After finding all the letters, we glued them down in order on the poster board.
Then, since we had all of these little tissue squares leftover from Sunday School, I had the kids help me make a "garden." You twist the squares around the eraser end of a pencil and then glue it down. It looks like a flower, or clusters of flowers if you put them close together. I let the kids make lines or circles of the glue all over the poster board, and I put flowers everywhere there was glue.
Then I added the title and let them help me write their names in glitter glue.
Then they wanted to add hand prints, so we did that with poster paint.
And I haven't really had a ton of time to think up and send out a lot of ideas...but today, I came up with one. And that's really how I roll anyway...I make a lot of this teaching/activity stuff as I go! :-)
This morning, on a whim, I decided on a fun little activity for us to do. The kids have been wanting to cut and paste things, and they've needed to practice using safety scissors. This project reinforces the alphabet, the order of the letters, phonics, uses observation skills, and helps develop fine motor. Here's what you need:
A piece of poster board, butcher paper or even construction paper
Old magazines
Safety scissors
Glue stick
Brightly colored tissue paper squares
Pencil
Poster paint
Allow children to peruse old magazines looking for letters of the alphabet. They need to be large enough to cut out. We went in order. Emma looked for "A," Alec looked for "B," etc. After finding each letter, ask "which letter comes next?" My kids would sing the alphabet song until they arrived at the next letter every single time. You can also ask "what sound does the A make?" if you want to reinforce phonics. It took us a good long while to find A-Z. I was pretty surprised that the kids stayed focused through all 26. I thought we may do like 10 letters and then pick up another day...but we made it through! After finding all the letters, we glued them down in order on the poster board.
Then, since we had all of these little tissue squares leftover from Sunday School, I had the kids help me make a "garden." You twist the squares around the eraser end of a pencil and then glue it down. It looks like a flower, or clusters of flowers if you put them close together. I let the kids make lines or circles of the glue all over the poster board, and I put flowers everywhere there was glue.
Then I added the title and let them help me write their names in glitter glue.
Then they wanted to add hand prints, so we did that with poster paint.
Their masterpiece is now hanging on the wall in their room...and they are really proud of it!
1 comment:
Hey, thanks for the inclusion in your blog and for the great idea! We are dealing with sickness here so I haven't forwarded that e-mail out to everyone but I will. Great idea!
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