Sunday, June 28, 2020

Personal Manipulative and Fine Motor Development Boxes

I have been thinking a lot about how to continue hands-on learning in my kindergarten classroom. I believe that kids learn best when they are actively engaged in what they are learning. Therefore, I have come up with the idea of personal manipulative and fine motor development boxes. I bought all the supplies at Dollar Tree and Target. 

These are the supplies that I have bought so far. I plan to add more as the year goes on. I will explain what I plan to do with the supplies in the rest of this post.


This is a picture of what will be in each student's box. These items can be used for math, word work, and fine motor development.  There is a can of play-doh. There are three little containers, one has 20 clear counting chips in it, the second one has 20 two-color counting chips in it, and the third one has pony beads in it.

This is a personal white board made out of a sheet protector and white cardstock. The bag on the right has a set of pipe cleaners in two sizes. I cut five pipe cleaners in half and I cut three pipe cleaners in thirds. The students can use these to make letters, words, numbers, or shapes. This is great for fine motor development and word work. There is a small container of bubbles on the bottom right corner of the picture. This is for fine motor development (bilateral coordination) and for calming down outside if we need a break. 

I got the tweezers, frog jumper, and chip clip (cat) at Dollar Tree. They are great for fine motor development and math. I am going to add task cards to the students' boxes and they will use these items in their tasks. The tennis ball is from Target. The tennis ball has a slit cut horizontally in it so that it can open like a little mouth. The kids can feed pompoms, addition problems, or sight word cards to the tennis ball creature as they count, find the sum, or read the word. Squeezing the tennis ball also develops fine motor skills.

The craft stick is used as a spacer when writing words and sentences.  There is a whiteboard marker is for the personal whiteboard. The green and purple pen is a dual tip pen from Dollar Tree. The kids can use this during writing practice. It is important for kids to practice writing with different types of pens, crayons, and markers so that they can learn about how much pressure to use when writing. The highlighter is for highlighting evidence in a text that we are reading and for highlighting their names before they turn in their work (this should eliminate no name papers). The last item in the picture is a reading helper (also from Dollar Tree). It highlights the sentence the student is reading and blocks out the line above it and below it. 

These items are for math and fine motor development. There is a bag of 20 pompoms, a bag of 10 white beads and 10 read beads, a bag of 20 mini erasers in five different designs, and a bag of10 cotton balls. 

I will post some videos later this summer of a student using these items. 


I bought these floor decals so that I can remind the kids where to line up (for social distancing). Teal is one of my school colors so I am going to cut the stripes and dots from the edge of each circle and use the teal center dot only. 


It may be a different year (and many things are still in flux), but my kindergarten students are going to have a great year of learning. We are going to have fun and learn in a hands-on way.  I plan to get a UV-C light wand to disinfect other manipulatives that cannot be made into individual supplies. This way a child can use the items, I can sanitize the items, and then another child can use the items. 

Sunday, May 3, 2020

Distance Learning in April

Hello, everyone. I hope you are all doing well and that you have adjusted (as well as you can) to distance learning. I want to share some of the things my students have been doing this month. 

We have continued doing art masters; I think art is a good way to help the kids (and parents) relax and release some of the stress they are feeling. These are the Matisse cut paper projects that my students made.  





We have been learning about famous Americans. We made a flipboard for each famous American and then the kids put all of their flipboard together to make a flipboard book.  The students watched a video about the famous American we were studying and then they looked for pictures related to that person. Next, they glued the pictures to their flipboard. Finally, they wrote details about the famous American under each picture. Here is a flipboard about Cesar Chavez. 

This is what the student wrote under each picture.


We have also been writing persuasive paragraphs. The students were asked to write a paragraph about what class pet we should get. Here are some samples of student work. 




Friday, April 3, 2020

Distance Learning

It has been three weeks since my whole world changed. Three weeks... it seems like it has been so much longer. 

We found out on Friday, March 13th that our school was moving to Distance Learning because of COVID-19 and we needed to send home books and work that day. I was able to get together one week of work for my students. I created a distance learning tab on my class website. I was hoping that this would not last long. At the end of the day, I gathered my little kinders at the carpet and I explained that school was going to close for a little while because of COVID-19. I explained their work for the next week and then we said a prayer together. During prayer, one of my kids said, "But I am going to miss you!" I held back tears as I told the kids that I would miss them too. I told them that we would see each other soon. I walked my students to the gate, gave them hugs, and they left with their families. 

Since then, one week has turned into three weeks. I, like many of my fellow teachers, have been working 12 to 14 hour days, creating online lessons, recording videos, uploading materials, emailing parents, doing online Zoom meetings with students and coworkers, and grading all of the work that my students turn in. It has been overwhelming and a little crazy. 

It is week three and I think I am finally in a groove with online learning. For the rest of the school year, I am going to be posting pictures of my kids working from home.


Here is one of my students working on a leprechaun project on St. Patrick's Day. 

I hope you are all staying safe and that you will stay healthy.

Wednesday, April 1, 2020

Art on the 100th Day

This post is from February, but I never got a chance to post it.

Today we painted a picture of the cherubs from Sistine Madonna. Yesterday we tried to do a directed draw of the cherubs. It was way harder than I thought it would be so I made another line drawing of it a home, xeroxed it onto card stock, and then I let the kids choose if they wanted to paint the one they drew or a line drawing that I did. 







We used crayon to color the cherubs and outline the clouds. Then we used water colors to paint the clouds in the background. We had a lot of fun painting the cherubs. They turned out so cute!

Wednesday, February 5, 2020

100th day in K

Happy 100th Day of School! We had a great day. The kids dressed up as 100 year olds (they were SO cute). 


We did some fun 100th day activities. This is a picture of the kids making a gum ball machine with 100 gum balls in it.



We talked about what we will do when we are 100 years old and we made this cute craft by A Cupcake for the Teacher.






Our third grade buddies came over to do an art activity with us. The kids had to use the numbers in 100 to make a new picture. They were very creative; they made faces, robots, trucks, TNT, trees, creatures, monster trucks, scooters, etc...








This is the third grade and kindergarten class. We love our buddies.


We had a great day. We are 100 days smarter!

Friday, January 17, 2020

Art Masters: Michelangelo

We have been learning about Michelangelo for the past two weeks. This week the kids made a painting based on Michelangelo's work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This is our version of Adam touching the hand of God. 

I drew the outline of the hands for the kids. Originally, I was going to have the kids draw the hands as a directed draw activity, but when I tried it myself I thought it would be way too hard for the kids to do. The kids painted the hands using tempera paint. 


Then the kids used watercolors to paint the background. They were able to choose the colors that they wanted to use for the background. 






They did an awesome job! I cannot wait to hang up these paintings in our classroom.