Football Sensory / Imagination Bin

HI ALL!

It’s been far too long since I’ve had the time or energy to post to this blog, but I’m excited to say that I’m finally ready to get back with it! I’ve got lots of fun things planned to keep these little ones busy over the summer and we’ll also be continuing with our preschool & tot school at home. The posts will probably be short and sweet from here on out, but I hope you enjoy seeing what we’re up to!

First up I’d like to tell you about the sensory bin we have out right now.
It’s all about FOOTBALL!

The contents include:

Green rice (I colored mine by mixing the rice with rubbing alcohol & green food coloring in a ziploc bag.)
Straws cut to 3 different lengths (hash lines)
Little connecting figures in 2 colors to represent the 2 teams. (These were a Target $1 section purchase awhile back, but you could also use colored clothespins.)
10, 20, 30, 40, 50 number cards
Green pipe cleaners with 10 white beads on each (field lines)
A coffee scoop
& a toy flag we had from a play golf set

As always I put the bin in the middle of a blanket along with some random containers and let the boys have at it.

They spent quite a while stacking, scooping, pouring, sorting, ordering, and observing the sound of the rice on the various containers.

I also used this as an opportunity to discuss some math concepts with Dude. We talked about the total football field length and the yard lines & hash lines. (I didn’t even know they were called hash lines until I was making this bin!) We also used the number cards and 10 bead bars to practice counting to 50 by 1s, by 10s, and just talking about the ones and tens place values. Dude is not quite 4 and can count, but still has a way to go in actually understanding the relationship between numbers. I think this was some good hands on practice though!

This coming week I’ll be sharing our letter W and water unit study activities, but until then you can check out our previous sensory bins, letter of the week activities, tot tray ideas, and boredom busters by using the tabs at the top of the Fumbling Through Parenthood homepage.

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Put Out The Fire Game- 3 Ways to Play

When I saw this sidewalk chalk game over at Your Therapy Source via the special education blog Creative Learning Fun, I knew it was something I wanted to try with Dude. And it fit in perfectly with our Letter Ff activities! I actually tried it 3 different ways trying to find a way that would make it a hit with my little guy. I'll try to briefly show each of those in case you want to change it up a bit as well.

We started off by trying this game exactly as described at Your Therapy Source. I drew a sidewalk chalk ladder with a fire at the top of it. At the bottom of the ladder I placed a bowl full of water and a sponge. Dude dipped the sponge into the water and then hopped up the ladder and squeezed it out over the fire to put it out (wash it away). After he had squeezed all the water out of the sponge he was supposed to hop back down the ladder to fill his sponge again until the fire was completely gone. I really liked all the different things this game was working on: gross motor skills through hopping, the hand muscles by squeezing the sponge, and the sensory aspect of playing with water.

But Dude was bored with this pretty quickly. He really just wanted to dump the water on the fire and be done with it. I can't really blame him.

   

So trying to stretch a little more out of this game I gave him a scoop and let him scoop water from the bowl into a pitcher. He then used the pitcher to put out the fire quite efficiently. 

Since Dude was willing I decided to change up a few things and give this game another go. This time we left out the hopping and the sponge. I drew another ladder and drew a zig-zag pattern of stars on it. We again placed the water bowl at the bottom of the ladder but this time I gave him a scoop to transfer the water to the fire.

    

This was definitely more fun! Dude seemed to enjoy walking the line while balancing his water cup. And there's a certain satisfaction in dumping the water out that was just missing from the sponge method.

 And because I'm me, we tried yet another version of this game on another day with another ladder, this time numbered from 0-10. 

This time I gave Dude one of our water squirters to use for transferring the water to the fire. He filled up his squirter then hopped up the ladder while counting out the numbers he was jumping on. I think this was Dude's favorite way to play, probably just because it involved the squirter. 

(These squirters are from Walmart and I absolutely love them for small children. They're very simple to operate. You just dip the end in the bucket, pull out the handle to fill the cylinder, then push the handle back in when you want to squirt. They're similar to this, but I think ours are narrower.)

Overall I guess you could say I think the idea of somehow moving up a chalk ladder to wash out a fire is a great one! Dude would probably be happy to repeat either of our last two methods. When Spudder gets a bit bigger I can also see us drawing out two of these and letting the boys race to put out their fires! 

However you do it, I'll bet you could find a way to make this game a lot of fun with your kids too!

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Feelings Lapbook & Letter Ff Fun

Our Feelings Lapbook was a HUGE success!  I really can't tell you just how happy I am that I decided to do it with my little guy. He learned a lot and I learned a few things too! I'm hoping that our work on recognizing our feelings and being able to put a name to them will help with him being able to understand and communicate how he feels instead of acting out in frustration. I've actually already seen examples of this in my son in just the past week!

We also used this as an opportunity to talk about "choices." When we feel angry or sad or jealous, we have choices. We can hit, we can scream, we can fall on the floor crying, or we can make "good boy" choices and share, wait our turn, find another toy or ask Mama for help. Reminding Dude that he's in control of these decisions seems to be helping improve his behavior more than me just telling him how he should act. I'm certainly not implying that my son was suddenly transformed into a perfect little angel, but I've definitely seen improvement in the way he interacts with his brother. This has been absolutely wonderful to see! =)

You can see the details of how we put this lapbook together and exactly what's in it HERE.

The main book that we used for this week was The Way I Feel by Janan Cain. It's an EXCELLENT book in my opinion. I looked at some others that seemed like they'd be great for a kindergartener or elementary student, but this one is simple, expressive, beautifully illustrated and a fun read! I think it's perfect for the preschool set. (You can find the other books we used for individual emotions in the widget at the bottom of this page.) 

After reading The Way I Feel we kicked off our lapbook study by reading our feelings mini-book, and then discussing each of our matching feelings cards. I then laid out one set face-up and let him match them up.

   

The next thing Dude choose to do were his Color the Feelings cards. We used our Dry Erase Crayons for these and ended up splitting them up over several days.

The favorite lapbook activity of the week were these popsicle stick puppets. Dude played with these a lot! We started off with me narrating stories while Dude acted them out and put on the appropriate faces. He then moved on to telling me his own stories. (We used milk jug caps as props.)

This story ended with "Mama put Dude & Spudder to bed."  My poor little babies..... :)

   

Another day we used our matching cards to play a game of memory. This required a greater degree of visual discrimination than your typical memory game since all the faces were yellow circles. I had to keep encouraging Dude through the first couple matches, but after that he got into it and did pretty well with the rest of the game. 

   

I had hoped Dude would enjoy drawing some silly faces on the This is Me... page, but he had no interest in doing that. He just wanted to scribble all over it. So we went with that and I helped him completely scribble in the face. Then I showed him how he could draw on it by erasing the marker with his finger. He thought this was neat! 

   

We also did some other Letter F activities to fill out our week. We did some tracing, but tried it a little differently than our norm. I wrote the letter with dry erase marker and let Dude erase it by tracing over it. He tried it using the felt tipped eraser end of a marker and then just using his fingers.  The fingers turned out to be a better option because he often wasn't exactly over my line with the eraser. But he was really eager to do it both ways, so I'll probably keep both in mind as ways to mix it up. With my son variety is definitely key so I'm glad to have a couple new ways to work on letter formation.

After he'd done the tracing a few times he was ready to take the pen and draw his own letters. (These worksheets are from the collage and trace packet over at Tired, Need Sleep. I really like them because they have arrows on them showing the proper way to form the letters. If you haven't seen this blog you're really missing out!)

He did his letter hunt worksheet.

And see he actually does have some control while coloring! Most often when I give him something to color or even just blank paper, he'll fiercely scribble and then declare he's all done. I was surprised to see him carefully coloring in the small rectangles on this worksheet. Not sure why he was doing it, but I was glad to see that he does have the necessary fine motor control to color intentionally. 

   

And of course there was dot painting! Have I maybe mentioned before just how much this kid LOVES his Do A Dot Paints ? We just couldn't leave them at home! 

These were magnet pages that I printed from Making Learning Fun, but if you're looking for do-a dot pages I later found a better resource for them over at dltk-kids. You can print these in black and white.

We used the How Are We Feeling? faces and base along with the handy dandy example card Carisa included with this pack to review our feelings some more. Dude also really liked this activity.

I gave Dude a mirror and we flipped through the Feelings flip book and tried making faces showing how we might look on the outside when we feel a certain way on the inside. 

We made this fun and simple Fire Craft. You can read all the detail about it HERE.

We also had a lot of fun using our feelings cards for a Musical Feelings Game. You can see exactly how we played HERE.

We also had fun playing another active game called Put Out The Fire.  You can see all the details of the 3 different ways we tried that game HERE.  

(Bloggy Note: I've decided to start posting our active learning activities as separate posts, mostly to make navigating this blog as easy as possible. As the mother of 2 busy boys, I'm quickly realizing that if there's anything on this blog I'm going to want need to recall quickly it's going to be the things that get my guys moving and help them burn off some energy!) 

Our Book Picks For The Week:

 

 

Look out for a new Preschool Lapbook debuting next week!

I'm linking this post up to Tot School , Preschool Corner, Show & Tell Blog Hop, the Ultimate Alphabet Craft Collection, For the Kids Fridays, Tot Tuesdays,  Feed Me Books Friday & Read Explore Learn

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Musical Feelings Game

We played this fun and silly Musical Feelings game today using the cards from our Feelings Lapbook. (These printables are available for free.) It was perfect for getting some wiggles out, working on listening skills, and reviewing what we covered this past week.

Here's how you play:

We took the flip book pages out of our Feelings Lapbook and laid them on the floor in a circle. This would probably be more fun done outdoors, but it was far too windy to do that when we played. It didn't matter for the way we played, but you could also put the cards face down. 

Put on some music and let your child walk, run, hop, jump, or dance from card to card. Dude did all of those things! (after my camera died unfortunately)

Stop the music and have your child FREEZE! Dude and I were both playing, so we both froze.

Then take either the card you're standing on, or the card your child is standing on and (hiding it from their view) make a face or describe a situation involving that feeling and have them try to guess the feeling. If your child is willing and able you could also let them describe the card they're standing on while you try to guess and then you describe the one you're standing on for them. I did all the describing for our game, but Dude often mimicked my faces once he'd figured out the answer. We had so much fun with this! If he couldn't guess it immediately I'd show him the face on the front of the card as a hint. 

There were also occasions where Dude gave a good answer, but it just wasn't the one I was looking for. That's OK! We all react differently to situations and I didn't want him to feel like there was a wrong way to feel so I just went with it saying something like: "Yes, some people feel mad when they get pushed down and some other people might feel sad when they get pushed down. How would you feel?" It was actually interesting for me to see just how Dude described his own emotions.

When your child guesses the card you're describing remove that one from the circle, start the music back up, and get moving again!

We had a lot of fun with this game and I could easily see it still being fun as Dude gets older and is able to come up with more of his own situations. It would probably also be a great game for pulling in older siblings to join in the fun!

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