Distinguishing Between Number, Letter, and Word

This is a literacy activity we did to see if the students could distinguish a number from a letter and a letter from a word. Surprisingly, both classes did really well with it. I mostly had the older children participate. This is super easy to prepare and great for practice with beginning reading skills. 

Farm Study

These photos are from my co-workers classroom. They have been working on a farm study the last couple of weeks and she has a TON of great ideas. I will probably be using some of these ideas soon myself. Thank you to Crystal for allowing me to use your photos!

Dollar Finds

Here are just a few dollar items I found this weekend. They are all from Target except the sorting tray which I got at Dollar Tree. There were so many more things I wanted to get from Target (mostly Seuss stuff), but I decided to put most of it back when I found a rug with streets on it for my son's room. I have been looking for one that he can drive his cars around on. 

Anyway, The Lorax bag is an addition to my collection of Seuss bags I bought last year. The idea is to put in the book that goes along with each bag and some other various items that also relate to the book such as stickers, word cards, etc. Then there are the Seuss number flash cards. I already have the shapes and colors cards that I divided among the other bags.

Then just some dry erase markers and dry erase cards to practice writing the alphabet.

Hope you get some ideas for your room!

Sorting using Venn Diagrams

Ok, so I'll admit, this activity started out as just shape and color review. Here is what I put in the block area. The "blue things" box I added on Wednesday and the "squares" on Thursday. That was going to be the whole activity. The idea was for the kids to just be aware of them, identify them and try to figure out what the items have in common. 

But then I began thinking, what if the kids notice that there are some blue squares and ask which box it should go in. What a great way to teach sorting by more than one characteristic. I don't know if that is an objective in your curriculum, but it is in Creative Curriculum. So, why don't we make a venn diagram and allow the kids to sort and that way it will account for those blue squares.

These 3 photos above are what it looked like when I sorted the items just to show how it would look. Below are the results I got when the kids did the activity:

I thought there was no way to fit all those items on that small paper, but leave it to the kids to find a way! They did an awesome job and I am so very proud of them!!!!

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Thinky Linky Thursday: On the Farm

This week, we are studying farm animals. Here are some of the activities we've been doing.

Beans in sensory table with farm animals and props.

Farm animal craft stick puppets. We colored, cut and glued them and then used them to sing Old MacDonald and do some dramatic play. 

Then the kids decided they wanted to have a puppet show and did this on their own. Mostly they were just making noises and not really having the puppets talk, but it was still cute and they were getting the idea of how a puppet show works. Maybe we will extend this interest in the coming weeks.

Then we sorted farm animals by which ones have fur, which have feathers and which have scales. There were, of course, no animals with scales, but I liked the idea of adding that as a choice to allow children to realize that sometimes there are categories that none of the items fit into.

Here is our farm felt board story. You can print these for free at Wondertime. They also come with little paper stands so you can use them as story props or game pieces.

And lastly, we played farm bingo. You can print these at Busy Bee Kid's Printables.

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