Alphabet Matching

This alphabet activity is a simple activity that can be used during centers time.  It can be adapted to meet the needs of individual students.

All you need is a sheet with the letters of the alphabet written in upper case and matching letters tiles. (upper and/or lowercase) For this activity I used commercially produced letter tiles and an alphabet mat that I created myself. If you don't have these items in your classroom you can easily make your own set.

Those children who are working on letter recognition can match upper case to upper case.  Those who already know their upper case letters could match them with the lower case letters.

For an extra challenge you could use more complicated fonts. Or, you could give the child a blank table and have him/her put the letters on is ABC order.

Skills

• reading and naming letters
• matching upper and or lower case letters
• sorting letters
• visual discrimination (making sure the letters are up the right way, differing b from d etc)

Measurement

This is one of the measurement activities that we recently used in our classroom.

Equipment

• Construction paper shapes
• Unifix cubes
• Paper (optional - to record lengths)

Activity

• The children predict them length of the fish.
• The children use unifix cubes to measure how long each of the fish are. 
• The teacher , or children record the length of the fish.
• They children compare the fish and order them by length (longest to shortest etc.)
•  As a lesson extention you may have children draw their own fish and measure how long it is.
• Or you could have them move around the room and measure other objects in the classroom.

Skills 

• estimating lengths of objects
• measuring objects using informal attributes
• sorting objects by length
• comparing lengths
• reading and writing numbers
• using vocabulary such as - longer, shorter, predict, measure, units, length, more and less

Unifix cubes are about one inch long.  When we were using them I used the word 'units' as a generic term so that when we are using other informal measuring tools the children won't be confused by the terminology.

Mud, Glorious Mud!

This week we played with clean mud.  I found a recipe on Pinterest (Pinterest is so additive. If you're not on it....I dare you to try it. There are so many great ideas.)

The recipe is so simple:
Mix water with baking soda until you get a mud like consistency. I would suggest just adding a small amount at a time.  If you do add too much you can squeeze or drain the excess liquid out.

This is such a fun and very messy sensory table experience.  Most of my students loved it, though a couple did not like the sensory experience. If it's warm enough I would suggest playing outside.


The first day the children played with just the mud.

 

The second day the children had some 'tools' to play with.

 
 The third day we added some color. (food coloring)

 

And the last day we tried mixing in a few other ingredients.
First we added vinegar, which unfortunately wasn't as bubbly as I had hoped. Then we added shaving cream which made it more slimy and mud like.

 

Of course the children were involved in cleaning up the mess.