Before I post this I have to admit I hate that you get to see the real deal... yes those dice have been ripped at over the years and are ready for replacement and yes, I have an old blanket pinned over my blinds to keep the winters chill out... curtains WILL come in time!!I love a good deal if you know me well. If you have little ones I'd love to throw a few ideas at you:) At Walmart you can usually find a placemat map of the U.S. It is fun to see how many states you can help them memorize. We keep little foamies (cut up mini-circles) which we stick on the map as we id and spell each. Say for example California... we talk about earthquakes, house foundations built on wheels," Disneyland, and beached whales. VERY RANDOM, eh? Wisconsin we'll remember they have "yummy cheese and milk from lots of cows who live on that land." There are so many little facts you can pull from your history and from the internet ofcourse.
We have a great Teacher's store in Windsor where we purchased foam dice. You can use any dice you can get a hold of for the kids to toss and count. I teach the kids here to count with a tune... just the good old A, B, C song! When kids get stumped they respond well to tune cues. We seem to count to 25 and sing... "and you sung it with me." With really young ones I have them follow my finger as I touch each dot. Any cube box works to convert into dice as well: ) Over time we begin to draw the # they just rolled. Marker boards are my favorite, little or big ones. When drawing we verbalize aloud --like for 5... "lay down stick, little down stick, and around- stop." STRANGE but it has worked well. I will alter my voice if it is helpful;)
If you have atleast a couple kids you can play your own form of Musical Chairs with number counting or with the alphabet song. We run around the chairs until we hit 25 for example. Some kids take turns adding an element like, "jumping" or they yell, "switch." For variety we'll count to 100 by 10 to the same tume slowly and then we sing... "and you made a DOLLAR for ME." With one of the boys with CP we have to try different things to help him obviously. He likes it when we rock side to side while counting by tens. Whatever works: ) Hope I'm making some sense.... time to go to sleep.... thanks for humoring me!!
2 comments:
Very cool ideas! You have such an awesome space upstairs for all this!!! Can't wait for our visit with you!
It makes sense Susie! I just wish I had the patience (and the energy) to do some of this with Aidan on my days off. One of my friends who will do daycare for use this fall is great at these types of activities too...so at least he'll get it somewhere! Thanks for the ideas though! Keep up the great work. :)
Post a Comment