family

kids discover activities and learn on their own through free play

Crafts with Kids 101: My Aha! moment

While all the other kids were busy building forts and playing in water tables, J wandered over to this rock with a divot that had collected water. Someone (probably a staff member) had left out an old paintbrush and J picked it up and started dipping it in the puddle and “water painting” on another rock. Ha! Why had I never thought of that?! No prep work needed, almost no supplies, no mess to clean up, and endless directions to pursue — use a paintbrush, sponges, roll toy cars through water, make water paint footprints and handprints, practice calligraphy, draw Anything you can think of, even do math on the sidewalk! … etc. Here’s an activity we could do at home any day for FREE (1 point!) that’s clean (2 points!) and fun (3 points!). (Points are nonredeemable but fun to collect.)  Read more…

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Discovering, understanding, and creating tessellations with my preschooler

Math Monday: Tessellations

… Then I brought out the craft supplies and cut out a circle, square, and rectangle from construction paper. He helped me trace each one several times to see what the pattern would look like. I asked him what was different about the repeating circles and the repeating squares/rectangles designs. He had a lot of random thoughts on the topic, but eventually mentioned that there are empty spaces between the circles but not between the squares and rectangles. He got it! 🙂 … Read more…

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A fun, creative, tongue-twister story written for preschoolers

Silly Stories for kids: the Zoo Train Parade

My 4 year old son and I sat down to brainstorm some more silly words (rhyming words or alliteration phrases or just plain silly sounds) and we (ok, mostly I) came up with this story. It’s fun to get him involved in the creative writing process so he can see how to get ideas flowing onto paper, then mash them all up and jumble them back together until they fall into place and you get a silly story. 🙂 That’s our official process at the moment.  Read more…

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story telling with preschoolers -- use of alliteration and rhyme

On-the-go Storytime

Besides answering All the Questions, another fun activity we like to do on long car rides is make up silly stories. N and I got rolling (umm, no pun intended) on a pretty silly story the other day and he helped me recall it tonight so we could be authors and write our very own book. Read more…

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Math Monday: Ten frame math with seashells

… At first we practiced filling up the spaces with shells and counting them until N got familiar enough with the visual that he could tell me at a glance how many shells there were (for numbers 1 – 10). Then I filled up the first one with 10 shells and put a few shells in the next 10-frame so he could see that for numbers greater than 10, you don’t have to start counting from 1 every time — you know there’s already 10, so you can just add on. Here’s our visual of the number 14, which is clearly, from the diagram, 10 + 4.

Then I extended the idea to include adding two numbers that were each less than 10. For example, I set 5 shells in the top 10-frame and 7 in the bottom one. Then he would take shells out of the bottom one to fill up missing spaces in the top one. So 5 + 7 became 10 + 2, since the 7 shells were used to fill up the 5 empty spaces and there were 2 left over. Then we went back to the previous idea of counting on from a full 10-frame to find out that there were 12 altogether. … Read more…

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Simple geography

… Little brother climbed up on the table at this point and started putting pieces on the board (he loved the magnetic part!). He kept shouting, “I found a united state!” as he slapped a new piece down somewhere on the map. 🙂

We also have an inflatable globe ball that we sometimes play with, but it’s been deflated for the winter since it was being used more as a Destroyer Of The House than an educational tool. Perhaps I can test their upgraded maturity levels this summer and try to re-introduce it. 0_o …  Read more…

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Spelling for Fun

… I suggested he put random letters on the bag or try to write words with the stickers. He wanted to write “N’s amazing rock collection” but settled for “rocks.” This simple activity spurred some great learning moments:

He sounded out the word and decided he needed the letters R O C. I asked what other letter made a “cah” sound and he remembered that K did. We talked about how English is a silly language because people a long time ago made it up by combining a lot of different rules and then they changed most of those rules, so here we are today using two letters that make the same sound to spell a simple word like Rock. He was okay with that. 

He knew he needed to add an S but couldn’t explain why, so I reminded him that adding an S makes things plural. I’d never taught him this before, but he learned it somewhere. … Read more…

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Memorial Day Weekend

… When they (I don’t know who) designed it, they accounted for the salmon that needed to travel upstream back to their home to spawn so they built a fish ladder with glass viewing windows for visitors to see the 5 feet (?) fish swimming in large groups upstream against a massive current. It’s amazing to see this, and it’s neat for the boys to get a close up look at life-cycles and the ways that people have worked to maintain species in their natural habitat in spite of industrialization. We’ll try to go back during peak season and get more pictures. There was a great little history museum there describing the process of digging the canals and building the locks, but it was way above the boys’ interest/understanding levels at this point. … Read more…

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Letting the day unfold

I had made no plans for the day, but it turned out the day had adventures of its own for us. One of my friends came over in the morning and she played wonderfully with the boys! They loved the attention and she helped them get a lot of wiggles out. The boys danced to their […] Read more…

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