Clothespin Work

Clothespin work is very important for preschoolers because it strengthens their little hands for cutting and pencil holding. As our middle child is working on small numbers, and counting with one to one correspondence I had Miss H make this "work" for him. She glued felt numbers (0-5) to the back of sentence strips, and put little dot stickers to indicate the right amount. She put odd numbers on yellow and even numbers on red and then counted out 15 clothes pins. It's a great little work, because it is self correcting, the felt numbers are a great tactile reminder to help form that association between number icon, number name, and quantity, I am going to add a list of the numbers going 0-5 for control of error. But thus far, a success. (Of course if I had made the work, I would have put 0 on a neutral color, and also color coordinated the felt numbers, but as my "assistant" turned five two weeks ago, I guess I shouldn't complain!)

Making Words

My "students" are not yet in Kindergarten, as they missed the cutoff in NC by five days, but either way.. some kindergarten teacher's loss is my gain. (This is what I think most days.. some days, I do not think this at all!) For the Pre-K twins I have been doing one of my favorite elementary literacy activities, called Making Words! Is was designed and invented by Pat Cunningham and Dottie Hall who were my professor's at Wake, and is part of the balanced literacy model. C and H just love this one and I am using the 1st grade lessons because you don't usually do making words in Kindergarten, but it does seem to be developmentally appropriate for these two. By far their favorite part of the lesson is when they get to write other words they can spell using the words they made. In this picture they have written crab, grab, flat, cat, fast, mast (don't worry we are working on handwriting.) For added fun, I have used these word slides from Cherry Carl (A generous genius who has all her literacy products online, and downloadable for FREE!!)

I also get some scissor work in by writing the letters on a piece of sentence strip purchased at the dollar store and having them cut it apart. This little easel was sent to me by The Mr.'s aunt, and came with some matching cards the kids still get a kick out of. I love using it for Making words because the two kids can stay seated at the table, but still get to "lead the class".

Hello Hello

Well, this was supposed to be the blog for the kids summer book club that I never managed to get off the ground. What was I doing all summer? Oh yeah.. nothing. YAY!

Anyways, I have opted instead to put up some of the activities I do at home and play-school in hopes that someone will find them useful.