Pattern blocks: Beyond templates

I blog about pattern blocks quite a bit. They are currently my favorite educational toy, and this is one of the (many) reasons why. Emma called me in the other day and said, “Mama, look at my robot!” I went in, and she had created this beautiful robot. She went on to explain that she gave the robot a skirt, because the robot is a girl.

Geometric Shapes Boat

Between gorgeous weather and a new baby, crafting has been a bit slow around here lately. I did put together this new geometric shapes template for Emma to use with her felt shapes on her travel felt board this weekend. Go here for other geometric shapes templates, and here to learn how to make a simple travel felt board. I also posted instructions on how to make a large felt/flannel board in two parts, here and here.

Blog Favorites: Preschool Activities

• Simple Cardboard Lacing Tubes and Montessori Smelling Bottles from The Wonder Years

 

• Homemade Lacing Cards from Just For Fun – made from greeting cards

 

• Shape Sorter Stamping from The Adventures of Bear

 

• Eco Friendly Crayon Melts from No Time for Flashcards

Homemade Maracas

They may be a little lacking in the handle department, but the kids don’t mind and these sound exactly like maracas. We filled ours with small pieces of cardboard, which make enough noise that the kids are happy and are quiet enough that I don’t mind listening to them all day long. Glue on the lids (hot glue works well) if you don’t want your children opening the containers. Our lids are not glued on, and my kids have had fun emptying and re-filling their bottles.

A few extensions of this activity that we may or may not do:

• Decorate the containers
• Try swapping out different materials to see what they sound like. A few we might try:
  • beans
  • rice
  • pasta
  • cotton balls
• Shaking along to the beat in a song
• Counting shakes
• Experiment with putting more or less of a material in the bottle to see how it changes the pitch and timbre of the maraca.

Learning to Write

I don’t send Emma to preschool, but I’m hesitant to say I homeschool her, because I don’t have defined learning objectives or a curriculum I use. Emma loves to play school, though, and she often requests specific things she wants to do for school. She’s been interested in writing lately, so yesterday I found these fun handwriting readiness worksheets via this blog post. Emma LOVED doing these worksheets, and she was not stressed about her inability to draw perfectly straight lines the way she has been when doing alphabet-based worksheets. She also wrote her name for the first time yesterday and was so pleased with herself that she wrote it again about twenty times – with varying numbers of horizontal lines for the “E” each time!

Free play with pattern blocks

I have blogged about my children’s enjoyment of pattern block templates before, but they get at least as much enjoyment out of pattern block free play. I love the thicker wooden pattern blocks for this activity since they allow for the building of towers and other 3D structures.

Pattern block templates are fun to do and allow children to learn about things like one-to-one correspondence and shape recognition, but there are at least as many lessons to be learned (and as much fun to be had) through free play. Free play provides excellent opportunities for learning about fractions (Emma has figured out that three blue diamonds equal one yellow hexagon), pattern exploration, shape recognition, textures, colors, and how different pieces fit together. Building towers (as Johnny is doing in this picture with the square pieces) teaches about balance and builds coordination.

If you are looking for more pattern block templates, there are some cute ones here in addition to those referenced in my previous pattern block post – thank you again Sandra for the link to this site!

Sidewalk paint: Take 2

We had another go at sidewalk paint yesterday. I made the paint the way you are “supposed to” with corn starch instead of flour this time. I also used washable paints instead of food dye after reading a comment left by Cindy on this post. We haven’t had issues with food dye staining on clothes yet, but I do know that it can be hard to wash out and both kids were wearing shirts I would like to keep stain-free. The kids painted with brushes until Johnny dumped all the bowls out, at which point Emma decided to come in (and Johnny soon followed). I don’t know if they were less into it because they didn’t like the texture with the corn starch as much as with the flour, or if it was just that they are both still sick (especially Emma, who is on week three of being sick nearly non-stop now) and so weren’t feeling very into doing anything. It was easier to get a nice paint texture using flour than corn starch, but the corn starch was easier to clean up since it didn’t stick to paint brush bristles. They didn’t try finger painting like last time, but Johnny did a lovely job of decorating his hands and feet (and clothing):

Emma’s hands, feet, and clothes were spotless, as usual.

Picnic Table Talk: Writing

I come from a family that enjoys writing. Our love of writing comes primarily from my father, who writes poetry and the occasional story in his (very sparse given his ten children and demanding job) free time. My mother also deserves credit, however – she is the letter writer in the family. She doesn’t write frequently (she does, after all, have the demanding job of mother of ten children – two still at home), but the letters she writes are always long and detailed.

I type more than I write by hand. I enjoy writing with a fountain pen, thanks to intensive handwriting education in French public schools. I type very quickly, but sometimes it’s good to have the extra reflecting time given by my penmanship.

I have done very little to teach my children penmanship. Johnny is too young (he does draw circles, which is pretty good for a 20-month-old). Emma has printing sheets, but she’s a perfectionist who only draws the letters she is certain she can get perfectly. I’m fine with that for now. She writes a very nice T, E, L, I, and U, as well as the occasional M and A when she is feeling adventurous.

I hope my children grow to love writing also, and I think there is a lot that can be done in early childhood to foster a love of writing. A few things I remember and try to practice as a parent from my own childhood:

• Read aloud, a lot.
• Write yourself, and let children hear what you have written.
• Write down stories your children tell you before they are old enough to write them themselves.
• Keep a journal and encourage your children to do so also. I’ve kept a journal for most of my life (every single day since September 27, 2003), and all three of my children have journals. Emma and Johnny scribble and draw in theirs as I did in my first journal as a child, and I’m sure Lily will be doing the same soon. I write occasional journal entries in my children’s journals to get them started with a record of their lives as well.
• Sing songs – often overlooked, this is a great way for children to learn about rhyming and the rhythm of language.
• Write simple stories and have your children use them to practice their penmanship once they are reading. My children are too young for this currently, but I remember my mother doing it with me, and it made penmanship practice much more interesting.

When a preschooler loves glue…

Emma recently developed an obsession with all forms of glue. She will happily spend hours gluing sheets of paper to each other. Sometimes she considers her final creation worthy of nothing better than the recycling bin, and sometimes she describes it as an elaborate work of art. This past week she decided she wanted to pour glue on single sheets of paper. In a bid to make this activity a little more exciting and to get her to stop pouring glue without making a scene, I added a couple drops of food coloring to the glue on her paper and handed her a toothpick. Emma loved swirling the food coloring into the glue, and she got some interesting results.

I figure it’s a good creative exercise; plus she gets some practice in fine motor skills. You can water down the glue a little if you want to make it last longer. This activity could be expanded by adding other colors and seeing how they mix, or by doing the activity in a plastic container and dipping sheets of paper into the solution to create a print-type effect.

Free Art: Painting

I feel this photo captures my two children’s personalities perfectly: Emma painting carefully with a brush, and Johnny moving quickly from paintbrush to hands…

…and then from paper to hair (sorry this second photo is so over-exposed):

I love washable paint!

Picnic Table Talk: Jump, Skip & Hop!

Picnic Table Talk this week is all about physical activities and outdoor games. We are really fortunate to have a lovely yard for the kids to play in, and when the weather is nice they will spend most of the day outdoors. I wrote a post back in February on keeping toddlers active indoors, so here are a few of our favorite things to do outdoors:

• Exploring: Both kids love exploring the yard and neighborhood – finding plants, flowers, birds, and other animals. We sort of live in the middle of nowhere, which means we get lots of animals: deer, groundhogs, and wild turkey in addition to the more common squirrels and birds.
• Outdoor toys: This summer we made a thrifty sandbox using an underbed storage bin. We have a couple Little Tikes climbing toys, one inherited from a friend and one that I picked up for $5 at a yard sale. We also have a trike and a ride-on toy, also picked up at yard sales for $3 apiece.
• Art: My kids love homemade sidewalk paint as well as chalk. Not exactly active, but a fun outdoor activity.
• Picnics: It’s always a treat for my kids to eat on a blanket outside, and I love the minimal cleanup. Also not that active, but picnics are always preceded and/or followed by active outdoor play.
• Walks: Emma and Johnny love to wander around our neighborhood.
• Water: Our town regulates summer water usage pretty heavily (even during super wet summers like we’ve had this year), so this is somewhat limited at our house, but both kids are happy to engage in any water-related activity.
• Balls: Throw them, kick them, chase them – endless fun!

What are your favorite ways to stay active indoors and outdoors?

Pressed flowers for young children

Emma helped me press some flowers recently, and then wanted to play with the finished product. Because she didn’t want the fragile dried flowers to fall apart, we decided to laminate them using some packing tape. Now she has beautiful dried flowers she can play with to her heart’s content without worrying about crushing them!

We pressed the flowers by placing them between two sheets of paper in a dictionary and leaving them there until they dried. Be sure to wait until the flowers are completely dried to laminate them, or they might mold.

Free Chocolate and M&M Graphing

Mars is offering coupons for free chocolate every Friday this summer. We used ours to buy some M&Ms, which we then used to make M&M graphs. I simply divided a paper into six sections and had Emma create a graph of M&Ms in the various colors. We talked about which colors we had the most and fewest M&Ms in, and counted the M&Ms in each column. Emma loved this activity (especially the part at the end where she got to eat some M&Ms), and is asking to do it again as  I type.

Johnny looks so innocently attentive in the top photo that I had to add this second picture, which is a much more accurate representation of his involvement in this activity. I was amazed that Emma had the self-control to not eat any M&Ms until the end, especially when her brother was gobbling them up as quickly as possible.

Picnic Table Talk: Organization

I try to provide my children with as many opportunities to explore their world and express themselves as possible, while maintaining a reasonably clean house. Organization is something I think about frequently, and a topic I have blogged about before.

I haven’t done much to organize learning in our house; I think very young children learn a lot by exploring their world, particularly if parents pay attention to and discuss their children’s interests. I am considering a loose adaptation of Sue Patrick's Workbox System to provide Emma and Johnny with things to do at their play table with minimal supervision when I am busy with the baby. If anyone has used workboxes in this way with young children, I would love to hear about it! Some things I would put in the workboxes:

• Play dough, sometimes on it’s own, sometimes with one of our homemade play mats.
• Pattern blocks, sometimes with templates like the ones I referred to in this post.
• File folder games like this one.
• Their travel felt boards with the activities mentioned in this post.
• Their crayon rolls and paper/coloring pages
• These paint brushes and paper

Have any other suggestions as to what I should put in these bins? I’d love any other ideas!

Here are a few things that work well for us in terms of physical organization:

• Divide craft materials into categories. I have some supplies (colored paper, fabric scraps, and pipe cleaners) that I let the kids use with minimal supervision. The next category is supplies that both kids can use with light supervision (crayons, markers, glue), followed by materials that require close supervision (small beads, scissors).
• Categorize toys. We keep our building toys in a different part of the house from stuffed animals and dolls, which are also separate from books. Puzzles are kept separately from other toys also.
• Make clean-up fun and easy. Each toy has a place where it always goes, and I use containers that are easy for my kids to put toys into. Sometimes they will clean up a toy on their own, but more often I clean up alongside them. If they’re reluctant to help pick up, we’ll sing a song and/or turn clean-up into a game (who can find the most red duplos, who can pick their toy up the most quickly, etc)
• Catch destructive mode before it’s full-blown. Emma and Johnny both occasionally go into destructive mode. For Johnny, this typically means he needs a nap; for Emma it’s a signal that she needs to do a structured activity.

What organizing tricks simplify your life?

File Folder Game: Matching

I originally intended for Emma to play a memory game with these paint chips, but while she loves memory games on the computer she did not enjoy the paint chip version. Both she and Johnny enjoy this matching game. It’s pretty challenging for Johnny and easy but fun for Emma.

MATERIALS:

• File Folder
• Paint Chips (two of each color; cardstock works too)
• Packing Tape

STEPS:

1. Trim paint chips
2. Attach one set to file folder using packing tape
3. Use second set to match
4. Make a pocket for the second set out of packing tape (fold one piece in half for the pocket and use three more pieces to attach to the folder)

Paint chips and color schemes

  

Emma loved this simple color-matching activity that I made using paint chips. I took two identical strips, cut one and left the other one intact. Emma’s job was to match the shades. The differences in shades are subtle enough that she found this activity interesting and challenging. Johnny didn’t understand the activity, but he still thoroughly enjoyed playing with his own set of paint chips.

This activity provides a good opportunity to discuss the concept of light and dark colors, favorite shades of a particular color, if you would need more or less dye/food coloring to get a lighter/darker shade, etc.

Sidewalk paint

Inspired by posts on several of my favorite blogs, we decided to try out sidewalk paint. We didn’t have corn starch, so I substituted flour. That worked pretty well, but flour doesn’t wash out of paint brushes as well as corn starch, so we’ll be buying some corn starch to use in future sidewalk chalk adventures. The paint was really easy to make (equal parts flour/corn starch and water, add food coloring and stir), and this activity kept both kids entertained for the better part of an hour.

They started off painting daintily with paintbrushes. I offered them larger brushes (which I still think would work better), but they wanted to use these little tiny ones.

Next they experimented with drip painting, followed by finger painting.

Finally, Johnny decided to use the sidewalk paint to give himself a foot mask, as well as to deep condition his hair. When they were done I carried them straight from the patio to the tub for a much-needed bath.

Here is their final masterpiece, fully dried:

Yarn prints

MATERIALS:

• Paper
• Yarn or string
• Tempera paint
• Phone book

This is another craft that Emma found in this French craft book. It’s quite simple.

STEPS:

1) Place a sheet of paper in an old phone book, coat the yarn or string (except one end) in paint, and arrange the yarn on the sheet of paper, leaving the end hanging out:

2) Place a second sheet of paper on top and close the phone book:

3) Remove the string, pressing down on the phone book

4) Open phone book, retrieve papers, and lay out to dry

RESULTS:

We made three different prints using slight variations to this technique.

Here is the first print, which was done with a lot of paint on the yarn and pressing down quite firmly on the phone book:

A second print with a moderate amount of paint, done closing the book and then re-opening and separating the pages before removing the yarn:

A third print made with the least amount of paint and pressing only lightly on the phone book while removing the yarn:

The third technique is the one recommended by the book, and I think I do like the effect best.

Emma enjoyed this activity and it created minimal mess, but she wasn’t interested in making more than three prints. I think it is something we’ll try again, though, and I’d like to turn the prints we have into cards. I also think this could be a good activity for introducing the concept of mirror images.

Pattern blocks and laminating by hand

After months of looking for pattern block picture cards, I downloaded set 1 off of Kelly’s Kindergarten (found via this blog post – thank you, Sandra!)

We happen to have both the plastic and the wooden pattern blocks courtesy of my math manipulatives loving mother. I first got out the wooden set, thinking that – since they are a bit thicker – Emma would have an easier time with them. She got very frustrated at the blocks not lining up perfectly, and so I gave up thinking we’d try again in a few weeks. The next day, though, she went to the closet, pulled out the plastic ones and the pattern sheets, and made this perfect dinosaur:

I don’t know if the thin plastic ones were actually easier for her to use than the wooden ones, or if she was just in a better mood the second day – but she continues to prefer the plastic ones over the wooden ones for this particular activity. If you don’t have pattern blocks or want to make a travel set, Sandra’s post links to printable pattern blocks that you can make out of cardstock.

I laminated all of the pattern sheets by hand using a roll of laminating paper, and if you look at the train compared to the dinosaur, I got MUCH better at it as I went along. Turns out the main trick is to expose no more than one inch of laminate at a time – may seem obvious to some of you, but it wasn’t to me. Of course, if you’re lucky enough to own a nifty laminating machine that’s even better!

First Sewing Lesson

Emma found a sewn card craft while perusing this French craft book from my childhood, and asked to make it. I was a little dubious about her ability to sew at all, but she really wanted to try the craft and Johnny was asleep (allowing for close supervision), so I stuck a sheet of paper in an embroidery hoop, poked some holes in the paper, and threaded a (blunt) needle for her to use. She had no trouble identifying and putting the needle through the holes, although she did get quite upset halfway through when she accidentally ripped the paper (hence no photo of the completed project). Maybe I should let her try embroidering on proper fabric since that won’t rip…