Tuesday Teachings - Candy Corn Learning

I love Fall and especially Halloween! It is my favorite time of the year as the colors are beautiful and there are lots of opportunities for learning.

I put together a little Candy Corn math puzzle for us to use this week. It was easy to make. I just drew a pattern on a piece of card stock. It was just a triangle with rounded edges, anyone can draw that. Next I cut my pattern into three sections.

The bottom section was traced onto Orange paper and cut out. The middle section was traced onto yellow paper and the top section was traced onto white paper. Once these were all cut out, I decided to use mine for number skills. I wrote the number word on the orange sections, the number on the yellow sections and then drew number dots on the white sections.

Next I set these out for my son to put together the puzzles. My son is only 4, so I only put out 5 full candy corn pieces at a time. Keep in mind that each puzzle is three pieces so it may be intimidating to a child to see lots of pieces on the table.

There are several other examples online of people making candy corn puzzles for education. Here are just a few:

Mrs. Freshwater's Class (free printable, letter recognition)

Mrs. Schmelzer's 1st Grade (Consonant-Vowel-Consonant words)

Have fun learning with your Candy Corn activities!

Tuesday Teachings - Name Rockets

We did a great activity this week to clarify the letters in our name and also the difference between upper and lowercase letters.

My son's name has 5 letters in it so I cut 10 small squares of construction paper. One square for each upper and lowercase letter of his name. I used two colors so that we could also get in a little pattern sequence. If he got stuck picking a letter, I asked him which color came next in the pattern.

In addition to the squares, I cut out two triangles to be the top of our rocket ships. The letters were written in the squares and then I sorted the squares by color. He did a great job and we currently have it framed and hanging on his bedroom door.

Since we wanted to hang this up, once he had shown me how to spell his name on both the uppercase rocket and the lowercase rocket, we glued down all of the pieces.

Monday Meanderings - I Love to Write

In honor of I love to Write Day, we are going to cover some writing ideas for kids.

Before we get to the links though, let's talk about pre-writing. It can be very difficult for a child that does not have enough strength in her hands to try to hold a pencil for a long time. In addition, it can be difficult to old a full size pencil. Imagine if you as an adult tried to hold a long carnival style pencil and write for very long. Your hand would cramp up and the writing will probably be illegible. This also applies to a child. With my own child, we try to use golf pencils. They are smaller, about the size of a crayon and he is better able to control the pencil.

Demonstrate  to your child how to properly grip the pencil between the thumb and pointer finger, letting the pencil rest on the middle finger. This is called the Tripod Grip. This will take awhile to teach. Be patient and if your child seems uninterested, come back to it later. You want your child to enjoy writing and if they are pressured constantly they will never enjoy it. To help your child relax, have her shake her hands, make drawings in the air or in a salt box (see below), or roll a piece of clay between her hands.

Our first link is PB & J Preschool discussing how to set up a Preschool Writing Center. She has some great ideas. I really like the thought of doing a Journal with my child to track his improvements over time.

Next up is Mama Jenn with the directions on making a homemade salt box for the kids to practice writing in. I love this idea! It is very sensory aimed and will give the children an opportunity to feel the letters.

Have you seen Sandpaper Letters? I bought some and they set me back about $30.00. Wish I had found Beautiful Sun Montessori prior to my purchase. She has a step by step tutorial on making your own letters. These have been great for working with my son on the letter sounds.

So we have covered pre-writing activities, let's move to some thoughts on writing. Here are some things you could have your child write:

1) Thank you notes for all gifts. If the writing is illegible, you can write something to the recipient also to let them know about the thank you.
2) Grocery lists. Cut out pictures of items you need then let your child glue them to a page and then write the names beside them. Your child can then also do a scavenger hunt (see our blog post of 6/10/10).
3) Their name. I have a small chalkboard that I painted my child's name on and he practices writing his name below it. I made the chalkboard with a piece of cardboard and chalkboard contact paper. There will be a blog post soon for all of the uses of chalkboard contact paper.

Tuesday Teachings - Word Family Eggs

Found this great project on line at Living and Learning Now

And I just wanted to expand on it some for our Teaching today.

Well Easter has come and gone and about right now you are wondering what are you going to with all of those plastic Easter eggs that are all over your house?

The eggs are perfect utensils to help your children recognize word families. Word families are groups of words that have a common feature or pattern - they have some of the same combinations of letters in them and a similar sound. For example, at, cat, hat, and fat are a family of words with the "at" sound and letter combination in common. The 37 most common word families in English are: ack, ain, ake, ale, all, ame, an, ank, ap, ash, at, ate, aw ay, eat, ell, est, ice, ick, ide, ight, ill, in, ine, ing, ink, ip, it, ock, oke, op, ore, ot, uck ,ug, ump, unk.

On the small side of the egg you can place stickers that have a letter per sticker. For Example, if you are making a word family egg for the family of _at, you could put a sticker with:

B
S
C
F
R
M

On the small side of your egg and then a sticker with at on the large side of the egg. The child can then twist the egg to make each individual letter match to the word family. This encourages word recognition along with letter recognition.