Target Practice

Throwing things seems to come naturally for kiddos - in fact just today I had a student who chose to throw things all over my room and ended up having a big clean-up job at the end of his adventures.

A few weeks ago we put some structure to the tendency to throw things by playing a game.

First we had to create a target.  I got a piece of recycled poster board and drew 4 shapes on it.  A few of my students helped to color in the shapes.

Next, I took the target outside to our playground and taped it on the building wall (using Mavalous tape - have you used this stuff?  It's AWESOME - this tape lasted us multiple times of taking the target off the wall and putting it back up again and it's still sticking on a wall in my closet for the next time we use it).

I placed a container of bean bags about 5 ft from the target and we took turns throwing bean bags to see which shape we could hit.  The students would practice their shape names with each hit.  I watched their accuracy and had the more experienced throwers see how far back they could stand and still hit the target.

It was a great way to work on throwing skills and practice shape recognition!

some september fun

Wow, it's already October!  In my last post (over a month ago - sheesh!) I talked about being flexible.  Well, my flexibility has definitely come in handy this school year.  I'm the director of our two campus program (teach part-time/direct part-time) and as such, I end up being the person who fills in the holes, or goes to the place that makes the most sense with our enrollment and current staff.  Well, with the new school year I had to make a switch to a different class on our smaller campus.  Instead of a class of 15-20 kiddos I'm running a group of 5-10 (so different! - I can actually sit at a table with the students and do art with them instead of running 5 directions at once!).  I'm really enjoying my new class and we've been having a great time together.  

Here are some of the things we did this last month:

For our first week we take time to become familiar with school routines and for our curriculum we focus on colors.  "Curious George's First day of School" was a great story to help introduce both the subject of school and color to the kids.  In the story, George visits a classroom and discovers all the things the kids do at school.  While visiting George also gets into the paints and creates all sorts of colors and, of course, a mess.  We didn't do the mess part, but we did do lots of color activities including color mixing with paint and shaving cream, ice cubes, and eye droppers.  (Sorry no pics - it was indeed the first week of school and my ducks were not in a row!)

The second week of school we focused on shapes.  I LOVE the book "Mouse Shapes" and all of my students loved it too.   

In this story the mice hide in shapes and entertain themselves with creating pictures out of the shapes.  

For some hands on learning I gave each student a piece of black felt (8"x11") for a background and multicolored felt shapes. As I was reading the story the students were able to create their own pictures with the felt shapes.  (This idea is not my own, but a combination from inspiration around the web.)  

We left the book and the felt pieces out for further exploration at a center area.

Make a Square

For this quick activity I gave everyone 4 pipe cleaners.  We lined them up to see if they were all the same length.  Then, we discussed how all the sides of a square are the same length.  Could we make a square out of our pipe cleaners?  Yes, we could!

For more activities with colors and shapes see these posts: "Exploring Color" and "The shape of things".

donkeys and dinosaurs

For letter D, our Abeka Animal Friend is "Dexter Donkey".  I wanted to find some more activities that centered around the donkey theme, but we had so many other activities happening this week that I didn't have time.   We did play a few rounds of "Pin the D on the Donkey", using the game to practice recognition skills.

There are so many fun things in our world that begin with the letter D!  I couldn't resist using a dinosaur for our "D" creation.

I cut out big "D's", gave the students paper shapes and a glue stick and let them create their own dino.

Other activities this week included:

Rectangle Match:  I made a math mat (using Publisher) with various sized red and orange rectangle outlines, then made rectangle cutouts to match the outlines.

Farm Magnets:  We are learning about the farm this month so the farm magnet board came out to play!

Creation Puzzles: (from here) One of my teachers put these together last year.  They were a great review tool while we were learning about how God made the world. 

The shape of things

As we continued to become acquainted with each other and our new routines at school we took the opportunity to focus on shapes.  We had various play centers (as always housekeeping, blocks, cars & library) plus a few centers dedicated to shapes.  I kept the paper in the sensory box (see my post about color) and posted a new shape to search for each day.  This was only a hit when I pulled the box into a circle time activity and had everyone find four rectangles - then we couldn't get enough!  

A shape sorting center helped connect our color and sorting skills.  I found printable shapes at mathsisfun.com, cut them out, and put them on the table with our color mats.  I will definitely reuse these shapes throughout the year for various activities.

Our main project for the week was to make a shape book.  I created a simple cover on publisher.

Each day we made a new page for our book.

Page 1: Square Rubbing, sandpaper squares and crayons (use tape to prevent the paper from slipping!). 

We had mixed results with this activity, my younger 3's didn't quite get the concept.

Page 2: Circle painting, tp rolls and paint

Page 3: Rectangle collage (we did the rectangle search in the sensory box prior to this activity and reviewed how to use glue sticks)

Page 4: Triangle paint, triangle cut sponges & paint

(I use lids from some of my storage containers for paint and a place mat on the table to catch paint - they work great!)

To bind the book I simply punched a hole in the top corner and tied with some cute ribbon - simple and quick.

At the end of the week I pulled out the tp tubes and the triangle sponges and had the students paint again exploring colors and shapes.