Photo provided by rrss.
Want a fun little song that gets the wiggles out while enforcing phonemic awareness skills? I thought you might be, so here it is!
It’s a very simple song, but kids love it! To the tune of “Shortnin’ Bread”:
Archives for March 2009
Rhyme-A-Saurus
For a fun rhyming activity with your preschoolers, create a Rhyme-A-Saurus! This dinosaur is not a meat-eater or a plant-eater, he eats rhymes!
Using a set of rhyming cards (you can find printable ones here or purchase a set at a teaching supply store) give your children one card each, and keep the rhyming pair yourself. Explain that this dinosaur is a rhyme-eater and loves rhyme sandwiches. Ask them to help you make a sandwich by putting two rhyming words together and feeding them to the dinosaur!
Book Activity: Bartholomew and the Oobleck
Bartholomew and the Oobleck is an enthralling story to read with children! It follows a king who wants something new to come from the sky, so he orders his magicians to make “oobleck”. As with many alterations of Mother Nature (Michael Jackson comes to mind) this, of course, turns out to be a disaster! It is only remedied when his page, Bartholomew, convinces him he needs to say the words, “I’m sorry.”
Dinosaurs Frozen in Time
Try this activity in your sensory table for your dinosaur fans! In containers of various sizes, freeze sand, shells, plastic dinosaurs, and or plastic bones in water. (If your items tend to float, freeze the container half full with the water and the items. Once it’s frozen, and holding the items in place, you can fill the container the rest of the way with water and freeze again.)
Place these prehistoric ice cubes in your sensory bin alone or with sand. You can also bury them in the sand for even more fun! Add containers of warm water with droppers or larger containers with warm water that the ice cubes can be submerged in.
Post It! Simple Graphing with Preschool Children
When you think of graphing, you probably think back to stale worksheets in your third grade class, or to more complicated parabolas in high school calculus. Graphing starts out as a very simple concept, one that can and should be explored with preschool children, particularly the four year-olds. One of my favorite ways to do that is with a Post-it graph.
The easiest way to start with the concept of graphing is to chart the number of boys vs number of girls in a group. It is a clear-cut dichotomy (in preschool anyway :)) . Start by having the children look around. Do they think there are more boys or more girls? In a larger group, this is often harder to do just by looking. We need to organize the information to make it easier to compare. Show your prepared chart, with a grid divided between boys and girls. Explain to the children that you will be using this grid to graph how many boys and how many girls are in your class. Ask each of the girls, one by one, to come up, get a Post-it and place it on the chart above the “Girls” label. Remind them that each person only gets one sticker, and that when we build a graph, we climb up the chart like a ladder: one sticker per square. Next, invite the boys to do the same thing.
