Teaching Maths and Writing to Children

I had a brainwave this morning, and cut out some little cloud shapes out of colourful paper, and wrote numbers on them from 1 to 10. I got the boys to choose from the clouds I held in my hand, and they put them down on the rug. I gave them some assorted buttons, and their task was to count out the buttons and put the correct amount on top of the clouds.

It's a good game to get them to practise counting.

JJ counting out buttons

It was pretty easy for JJ, and SamSam wasn't concentrating - but they were very enthused by this new game. Next time I will have higher numbers for JJ to count out, and I will more closely supervise SamSam!

I keep all my activities and paper that I can reuse in a folder with plastic sheets. It helps to be a bit organised!


Spelling and Writing for Kids
JJ has progressed with leaps and bounds in his writing ability. Since he can now write the majority of the alphabet, I am venturing out to create more advanced worksheets.

The worksheet I made up today has words with missing letters at the beginning, along with a picture of the word. JJ (3.5 years old) got a crayon, and SamSam (2.5 years old) got stickers with the missing letters written on them.

JJ writing in the missing letters

 

SamSam having a go at sticking in the letters

Day at Home

This week has been so busy. Today we finally just get to stay at home, it's nice not to have to rush anywhere!

Pasta play
They played with miscellaneous pasta shapes, and bits of drinking straw, with assortment of cups, spoons, ladles and string. They really enjoy this simple activity.

Matching the animals
I wrote different animals on some bits of paper, plus some names of fruit, and lay them out on the floor. I gave the boys a little carry case packed with plastic animals and toy fruit. Their task was to match each animal and fruit with the paper.

Coconut and Boat Game
The boys have a small inflatable boat. I found their collection of balls - all different sizes, and I called these 'coconuts'. They had to sit on the bed and throw the coconuts into the boat. I pretended to be a hungry crocodile and was sang a funny coconut song.They found this game hilarious!

Computer Time
When SamSam goes down for his lunchtime nap, JJ sometimes gets computer time. There are so many interactive resources on the net which are totally free and are educational. JJ loves spending time on the computer. We limit the amount of time he spends on it, and it's at the moment, he only gets to go on it every few days.

Puzzle Time

Toilet Training
SamSam started being toilet trained this week. He is doing really, really well! Hardly many accidents! I was using the sticker reward system, but I found that reward biscuits work much better for him! Chocolate Tiny Teddy Biscuits are a real fave :)

Impromptu slide
Boys love to be active. A roughly made up slide on the couch, with the slide leading to a drop onto cushions on the rug, amused them for a long time.

I love my boys!

Letter T Day

JJ is so eager to learn that last week he wanted to play learning and teaching.

While the boys packed two backpacks with pencil cases and water, and pretended to take the bus to 'school' (by rearranging the cushions on our sofa to look like a bus), I whipped up a very simple lesson plan:

Aim: Teach about the Letter T
Method:

• Writing the letter T
• Reading T words
• Playing a T game
• Singing T songs
• Making a craft - animals that start with T
• Storytime Letter T

I photocopied some writing activity sheets for the letter T. The boys took their pencils and traced the dotted lines and coloured the pictures.

Another activity sheet had words beginning with T. I got the boys to read them out - truck, tomato and television. I took a piece of paper and wrote them as a list, and then we talked about how the letter T sounded. Then we added more words we could think of. We came up with Thomas (naturally), and troublesome (!).

I stuck these words up on a door so they could see them.

It was time for some singing with the letter T.

The only nursery rhymes I could think of with the letter T, were 'I'm a Little Teapot' and 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star'. I wrote the titles on a piece of paper, and drew a teapot and a happy star, then stuck it on the door.

Then I pulled out my guitar and boys ran to get their percussion instruments. We sang the songs, and they shook their instruments and walked around the room to the rhythm of the music.

Other pictures and yellow suns are from Sunday school!

Then it was time for a letter T game.

For the game I wrote some words starting with the letter T, cut them up into strips, and put them in a pencil case. The boys had to take turns taking a word out, read it, and then stick it on the object with blue tack. The words we had included, television, toes, tshirt, tap. Toes was a fun one, as they stuck it to Daddy's socks as he sat on the sofa.

JJ holding his school bag

To wrap up, it was craft time with the letter T.

I asked them which animals started with T. I don't think they did very well, so I suggested turtle and tiger. JJ chose to make a turtle, and SamSam the tiger.

The boys LOVE glue. We bought some of those liquid gluesticks at the $2 shop, and they just love squishing the glue out. I drew an outline of the animals, and cut up lots of little pieces of magazine for them to make a collage.

Here's what they made!

Realised later that the tiger's tail is all wrong. Will have to get better at animal drawing!

I had a backup activity in case they wanted more, which was reading to them the letter T from the Richard Scarry book, but it was time to have a run around outside after all this concentration!

Evaluation: The letter T 'day' was a real hit. The boys learned a lot, they were occupied for quite a long time, and for me, having a plan to follow was really good - it made things much easier.

What I'd do next time: I think as the boys get older I'll need to prepare some of these 'lessons' in advance - like having activity sheets already photocopied and art equipment prepared. I found that the boys would get up to mischief while I hurried to prepare everything!

The good thing is that the lesson plan can be duplicated for all other remaining letters, hurrah!!! :)

Thomas Letter Game

Today I had a brainwave and created a new word-game for the boys that's based on their favourite Thomas the Tank Engine characters.

It's called the Thomas Letter Game (until I think of a better name).

I found some images of the Thomas characters, and put them into a Word doc. I typed the name of each one above the image, excluding the very first letter - so Thomas looks like "HOMAS", and Percy looks like "ERCY" etc. I printed them out in colour on our printer.

I stuck the printouts on a wall with blue tack, just at the right height for the boys to look at. I also printed out the missing letters, cut them out, and put them in a little pile.

The kids took turns to take a letter from a pile, and match it to the correct character, sticking it with bluetack onto the printout.

My boys LOVED playing it.

Most of the time they walked around a bit, tested how each letter looked with the name to see if it looked and read right. On the odd occasion they knew immediately where a letter belonged - like the sounds for B, P and H were matched immediately to Bertie, Percy and Hiro.

This game is the right reading level for JJ (an advanced 3 1/2 year old reader), and harder for SamSam (2 1/2), but SamSam still managed to get some right on his own. What he really likes is looking at his favourite trains up on the wall!

It was surprising that the most obvious letter 'T' for Thomas was the hardest for them! I think maybe because they can't pronounce the letter T properly yet (they say something like Nomas!).

I was hoping to put the file here for downloading, but there's no function on blogger to do it!

However, this concept could easily be changed to a different category, eg. fruit, animals, nature, objects, food etc. It's pretty easy to make if you know how to use Word.

What you need: 

• A printer, preferably colour
• Paper to print on
• Blue tack
• Scissors

Instructions:

• Create document with images and typed words with missing initial letter
• Print out the pages. It looks best in colour.
• Use bluetack to stick onto the wall at the eye-height of your children
• Cut out the letters and put them in a little pile
• Each child takes a turn to pick a letter from the pile
• Stick some bluetack on the back for them
• Let them figure out which letter goes where
• Give helpful hints where necessary!

Rhyming Bingo Game

Yesterday at the toyshop in Beechworth, I found a bingo game for kids that was based on rhyming words. I thought I'd try making my own version and playing it with JJ.

Setup

I made two bingo cards with four words on them:
1) Boat, House, Star, Moon
2) Spoon, Run, Red, Far

Then I made some cards with words that rhymed with the words on the cards:
goat, mouse, car, balloon, bun, and bed.

Teaching how to play
I asked JJ if he wanted to play a new bingo game called Rhyming Bingo, and he said yes.

Sitting at the table, I explained to him what rhyming words were. I used a piece of paper like a blackboard, and wrote examples for him to see while explaining.

Playing the game
Then JJ got to choose a bingo card, I took the other. I put the word cards into a little pencil case. Then he picked a card from pencil case - he giggled when he got to choose a card!

Once he got a card, I said "OOhh! What card did you get?" He read it out loud "goat". I asked him which word on his card rhymed with goat, and he had a good look and said "boat". Success!!

He put the word card above the word on his card that matched. Then it was my turn.

We kept playing until JJ had all the words covered, at which he got to say "Bingo!" and he was very pleased.

I think I'll play this game again but modify it to have more words so it lasts longer - say nine words on the card. At least he has the concept now!

This Bingo game could also work really well for foreign languages in matching English words with the foreign translation.