budget

Ice Sculptures

December 18, 2009 by notjustcute Filed Under: Get Outside, Learning through Play and Experience 9 Comments

Ice is a fun, inexpensive, and fascinating material to explore in your sensory table! I like to add color to the water before filling my ice molds, to add interest, and so that the colors begin to mix as the ice melts. Then I fill a variety of containers – ice-cube trays, of course, but also empty plastic food containers (Cool Whip, sour cream, yogurt, etc.), plastic cups, popsicle molds, muffin tins – anything to create an interesting shape. You can place these in your freezer, if you have the room, or if you’re lucky enough to have absolutely frigid temperatures as we did here, just place them outside overnight.

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Make at Home Montessori

May 20, 2009 by notjustcute Filed Under: Create, Learning through Play and Experience Leave a Comment

I bet you didn’t know they were giving out free Montessori tools at your local hardware store! I’ll tell you how, but first I must start with the disclaimer that I am not a Montessori teacher. I studied child development, and so, I examined a range of developmental theory and teaching philosophy. I find that as I teach, I don’t strictly espouse any one pedagogy but pick from the variety I studied and implement them as they fit the child and circumstance. That being said, I would like to share with you a little discovery I made recently.

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How to Find Sensory Materials on the Cheap

February 11, 2009 by notjustcute Filed Under: Learning through Play and Experience 7 Comments

Photo provided by ba1969.

dollar-sign3 So you’ve found a way to create a sensory table without a huge hit to your budget. Now how do you keep it filled with a variety of materials without dipping into your rainy day fund? There are plenty of fantastic sensory experiences that you can provide with little or no cost, and most of them are reusable!

Capitalize on Catastrophe. If you’re as lucky as I am, you have a few extra hands in your house that tend to increase the number of spills in your kitchen. I’d be lying if I said all the spills were at the hands of my children. Suffice it to say that between the four of us in our home, the floor has seen its fair share of disaster. When these spills happen in our “dry foods department” and on a large scale, I scoop them up and store them with my sensory supplies rather than throwing them out in the trash can. This is how my popcorn kernel supply began, and has also contributed to my colored rice collection. With flour and salt, I often bag them up and save them for making playdough.

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The Sensory Table On a Budget

December 8, 2008 by notjustcute Filed Under: Learning through Play and Experience 12 Comments

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.

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