Photo courtesy of hyperorbit.
Archives for December 2008
Five Little Snowmen
Here’s a great fingerplay for a snowy day:The Classic Playdough Recipe
The ingredients:The Sensory Table On a Budget
A water filled bin as a sensory table.
In many preschool rooms, the sensory table is often surrounded by children. It is an inviting area of the room where children are encouraged to stick their hands into the medium of the day, be it water, colored rice, or even slime! Children gleefully run their fingers through a new texture, scooping and dumping to their hearts’ delight, all the while using vocabulary words like, mushy, gritty, or runny. They naturally compare volumes and textures, diameters and temperatures as they engage in their play. Flow patterns are observed, compared, and manipulated as children pour water down tubes and rain gutters, and cause and effect is constantly tested. The sensory table is a melting pot of a variety of developmental objectives while also being so completely fun and engaging! Sensory tables designed for and sold to schools easily run into the hundreds of dollars. Parents and teachers in smaller preschools are often left feeling like the sensory table is an experience reserved only for large institutions. That does not have to be the case! Here are a few ways to put the sensory table in reach of every child’s hands.
Book Activity: Mmm, Cookies!
This fantastically fun read is by one of my favorite authors, Robert Munsch. He began as a storyteller who always knew how to get and keep a child’s attention, and was later convinced to put his stories into print. This silly tale follows a little boy through his mischief as he makes pretend cookies out of playdough and serves them to his unsuspecting family and friends. It’s sure to grab the interest young children as they join in the repetitive text and absorb the outrageous illustrations of the characters’ outlandish reactions to eating playdough.
Each time Christopher makes a new cookie, this book implements a fantastic use of onomatopoeia with a repetitive text that just begs for kids to join in. Here’s how I do it (words in italics from the text):
