In an overseas visit to my family, I noticed that my aunt had life size portraits of her grandchildren hanging in her bedroom. I loved how each child decorated their own portrait differently, with no influence from an adult.
In an effort to unite my children with their cousins around the world, I ordered some butcher paper and make our own as an invitation to create for my children while also discussing a delicate topic (skin color) in a way that makes sense to young kids.
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We used People Colors from Lakeshore Learning to find the matching skin tone for each kiddo as we drew. Snag your own "People Colors" set from Lakeshore here. (I'm not their affiliate but I LOVE these)
Update in 2021: Crayola now makes people colors and they're called Multicultural Crayons!
Using multicultural crayons is a very natural way to discuss diversity, particularly skin color, with young children. When we first got ours, we read out the names of all the colors in the box: coral, sable, chestnut, maize, peach, ebony, mocha, melon.
We talked about how all the colors of skin are beautiful and important, including the ones we chose for ourselves. Positive Self Talk can improve kids confidence, so don't be afraid to compliment you're own looks and what makes you special. (Here is a great positive self talk activity you can print out for free).
We also discussed that the words "black" and "white" are opposites, but that people really come in all shades of the same color, not opposites at all. When we stop feeling like we are opposite, then we can focus on what we have in common.
We all have hearts; all of us feel joy and sadness; we all like to be a part of a community, to feel like we belong.
Children do notice differences between people, so rather than "shush" them or pretend they don't exist, when a child notices something different about another, we can acknowledge that difference and validate that being different is what makes us special and interesting.
When we bring up the subject of race with kids from an early age, we can teach respect, love, and unity before they reach an age where they feel uncomfortable discussing race or worse, when society has taught them negative stereotypes and biases that will need to be unlearned.
We are all human, and we are all beautiful. It's never too early to teach our children to appreciate the beauty of every color and the people behind the colors as well.
Social emotional learning refers to learning about ourselves and how we fit in with others. By discussing positivity in differences, we are allowing children to ask questions and face biases that they may have already learned.
The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) lists 5 core competencies:
1. Self-Awareness
2. Social Awareness
3. Responsible Decision-Making
4. Self-Management
5. Relationship Skills
By first discussing our own self as we create life sized portraits, we build children's self-awareness. By discussing the differences between portraits and also the differences among all people we are helping build children's social awareness and relationship skills.
I searched for the perfect DIY Dinosaur Eggs Recipe for ages before I decided to make my own!
I don't know about you, but my little preschoolers are dinosaur lovers. Everything needs to be dinosaur themed: dino eggs, dinosaur chicken nuggets, dinosaur fossils, and Jurassic park theme songs rule my life.
I knew I hit a winner with this really DOABLE dinosaur egg recipe...Dinosaur eggs filled with mini dinosaurs? What more could a kid possibly want? All these activities make for fun, hands on learning experiences with items you likely have around the house.
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Recipe makes 9-10 dinosaur eggs with treasures inside.
Ingredients
You can really put any similar toy inside. I've put fairies, unicorns, gem stones and any small treasures I can find as long as they're safely tucked inside when baking. Always use adult supervision when using the oven!
Once I'd gotten the DIY dinosaur eggs just right, I made a little nest of twigs and branches in the yard and surrounded the nest with the parent dinosaurs.
Calling the kids to come outside, I urged them, "These dinosaurs need your help. Their eggs are about to hatch, but someone has stolen them and now they're all lost. Can you find all the dinosaurs, bring them back to their parents' nest, and help the eggs hatch to reveal what is inside?"
To break the eggs you can use anything: mallets, hammers, or even throw them on the ground. Remember to practice safe tool use (we used plastic tools) under parent supervision.
If your child is younger and having a harder time cracking the eggs, dunk them into a little bowl of water. As a result, they'll be a bit softer and easier to break.
There is something so satisfying about watching these baby dinosaurs emerge from the eggs! Truly, I can't stop watching.
Are you ready to try my DIY dinosaur egg recipe? You will not regret it! Looking for more sensory experiences for your little learners, check out these activities.
One of the best ways to practice shape identification is through sorting shapes. Using contact paper to make a sticky wall, you'll have the perfect shape sorting setup!
If you're wondering how to make a sticky wall, you'll want to watch the quick timelapse on this post: Sticky Wall Activities
Before you play, make sure you have sectioned off areas of your sticky wall for each shape. You can do this with tape or like in this photo below, by putting a differently colored paper behind the contact paper.
Then you'll need some shapes. I cut up pieces of construction paper in every which way to make shapes, but you can also use these helpful foam shape stickers, to make it easier to prep. Either label each area or put a different shape in each area so kids will know which shape goes where.
Kids are like sponges. When they're engrossed in a fun task like sorting shapes on the sticky wall, they can pick up a lot more information through guided questioning techniques. Here are some questions to use while they're sorting shapes to help your child think about shapes in different ways.
You won't wanna miss these tape shapes. Look around your home for items that match the shapes and put them inside the matching tape shapes.
For a low prep shape sort, you can download my shape sorting pdf! Kids will practice sorting triangles, squares, rectangles, and hexagons.
And this crack the code activity! Does this count as sorting? It's kinda backwards sorting as you crack the shape code!
Wow! This kindergarten teacher avoids all prep with an epic collage that has kids sorting shapes they see in magazines! Check out 2D shape sort from thekindergartensmorgasbord.com.
Finally, if you're looking into 3D shape activities, you won't wanna miss this shape sort and so much more!
A sticky wall is a fine motor platform for so many types of activities: art, building, sorting, and puzzling. It can include open ended activities or can have a prompt, and best of all it keeps kids busy while meeting their sensory and creativity needs.
Sticky walls are also sometimes known as sensory walls. Kids just love using their senses to touch and explore different materials as they put them on and take them off the wall.
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Materials:
Blue Painters tape - safe for walls!
Contact paper for walls!
Can you use toilet paper rolls and other recyclable items to make a path for your pom poms?
Place a coloring page with your child's favorite characters behind the contact paper and with tissue paper or construction paper, have them tear off sections to "color in" the character.
Match puzzle pieces together on the wall for a new way to use your puzzles!
Toddlers love the soft feeling of pom poms as they place them on the sticky contact paper. This sensory wall combines sticky and soft textures for open ended play. Include language development by discussing the size and colors of the pom poms.
For the next two setups, you'll want to remove a small piece of the blue tape so you can place colored paper behind the contact paper. Then redo the blue tape...Now toddlers can sort items by color. Use flat, lightweight items to make sure they stick.
Section off the wall into areas for each shape. Cut out paper shapes or find shapes in your home. To get your free printout of shapes to sort visit this post.
Open ended and celebratory. This one is perfect for a special day. Blow up balloons and stick them as you please. Throw and see if you can get your sticky wall to "catch" your balloon.
Open ended- kids use letters to stick to the wall and make words. Kids can explore letter names, match uppercase and lowercase letters, etc.
For more hands-on ways to learn about letters with toddlers and preschoolers, you'll wanna see these 12 Letter Games.
This activity comes from Happy Toddler Playtime, and is all about sorting coins! How fun!
This one is a little different, because I taped the contact paper into a cardboard frame so we could take it on our nature walk. You could also collect natural objects from a walk and then bring them home to put on the sticky wall you already have.
When your sticky wall begins to get slightly less sticky and it's time to switch it out, don't throw it away. Instead let your children decorate it with different kinds of paper (tissue paper, construction paper, cardboard, cut outs) and then remove it. To keep the art intact, place it sticky side against the wall for a beautiful decorative art piece.
In a hands-on making words activity, kids will explore letters and work on phonemic awareness and phonics skills. Much better than a worksheet, grab a baking tray and some magnetic alphabet letters and find the right activity for your child's level below.
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Using the BEST magnet letters from Coogam, we have created tons of reading games to learn letter names and teach letters together with their sounds.
This set of letters make much more visual sense for kids to work with than other multicolored magnet letters you usually see:
Also don't buy a fancy magnet board; you just need any old kitchen tray!
Before making words, comes the understanding the words are made up of letters and sounds. Exploring letters with or without sounds can be a great introduction to phonics.
My little one loves to explore with her magnet letters. She's 22 months and starting to show interest in learning letter names recently.
Lil Sis loves to pick out the same letters as Big Sis and repeat their names as she puts them on her tray. I am NOT of the mind that we need to teach kids letters this young, but if they pick it up on their own, what could be better?
Another learning opportunity with letter exploration is introducing each letter with its sound. As your child picks out a letter, you share the sound that letter makes, to start exposing them to the idea that letters make sounds.
Or if you are only learning the names of letters, kids can match lowercase and capital letters. If you want to target specific letters, limit the number of letters they're playing with. Too many new letters can cause visual overwhelm.
Part of learning to read and write is being able to isolate beginning, middle, and ending sounds of words.
Breaking up a word into all the sounds that compose it is called "segmenting." This hands on activity helps emerging readers isolate sounds and segment words.
Sound isolation and segmentation are part of an umbrella of skills that build phonemic awareness, which is essential for kids to have when learning to read.
In this example I made mostly CVC (consonant vowel consonant) words that were missing their middle sound. Begin with beginning sounds, then work on ending sounds, and finally middle sounds as they're the most difficult.
During this making words activity, I read each word that was missing its middle letter to Big Sis. Then she would attempt to segment the word, isolate the middle sound, and find that letter to make the word complete.
It was great to have the Coogam letter magnets since she could easily focus on the red letters for this difficult task. It also was a natural way to bring up vowels and consonants and examples of each.
For a more abstract activity, I had Big Sis make her own words, only specifying that they need to all include at least one red letter (a vowel).
She decided she would place letters on the tray and then read them to see if she had created a real or a silly word.
Through this creative game she was matching letters with sounds, constructing words, reading words, and then using comprehension skills to determine if the word was real or silly.
Another way to play would be to say a word and have your kiddo spell it out phonetically on the tray. To be honest, I loved her creativity in making silly words and enjoyed hearing her sound them out more than my original idea!
Learning through movement is a great way to get kids excited about learning the letters and sounds. Zig Zag Letter Balance is a two minute prep alphabet activity that kids totally love!
Both toddler and preschooler loved hopping, tip toeing, running, and dancing in this game so much they didn't even realize it was a learning game!
Learning through movement is also known as kinesthetic learning. This is one of a set of learning styles such as visual, auditory, verbal, logical, social and more.
Kids are knownto have a strong connection with kinesthetic learning! Got a kid who doesn't like worksheets but will play with their soccer ball or fly their plane in the air with great concentration? They might be a kinesthetic learner!
According to indeed.com, Kinesthetic learners retain information better when they can move their bodies and interact with their environments. Learning through movement has also been linked to greater self confidence and engagement while learning. That's all to say, it makes it so much more fun!
First grab some blue painters tape and pick a spot in your home or outside to create a zig zag line. Make sure to use painters tape to avoid ruining your floors! Create an kind of pathway with the tape.
Next, place Post-its along the path, and write the letters your child is learning on them. Stick to 5-10 letters for this game.
Ages 2-4: For kids just starting out with letters, this game can be solely a letter identification activity. You walk across the pathway and whenever you come to a letter, you say the name.
Ages 4-5: For preschoolers who have familiarity with letters and are working on sounds, they can name the letter and letter sound when they get to a letter.
For a challenge, kids can name a word that starts with that letter or even more challenging, spell a word that begins with that letter. That way they're working on beginning sound identification and spelling!
Ask your child what they notice about this zig zag line! Children may have a natural inclination that this will be a game about movement, letters, or both.
Invite your child to move across the line, but stop at all the letters. They can name the letter, name the letter sounds, or say a word that begins with that letter!
Think of all the different ways of moving across the line. Here are some ideas:
As kids think of more ways to revisit the balancing line, they're exposing themselves to the letters and practicing those names and letter sounds over and over again. The more exposure they have, the more it sticks!
To help your kid become an alphabet champion, check out these 13 Letter Learning games we LOVE.
Kinesthetic learning helps kids build new knowledge in ways they enjoy, and a secondary benefit to learning through movement is the improvement of gross motor skills.
Gross motor skills are any activity that uses the gross motor muscles that make large movements: arms, torso, and legs. Let's face it, kids are NOT the most coordinated bunch so developing these muscles through movement is essential and helpful. First5California.com has some helpful gross motor milestones to check out!
So often kids are seated for learning time, but my personal rule is that kids shouldn't sit for more minutes than twice their age. When we invite kids to play and move to learn, they jump for joy and learning becomes fun, not a task. How would you rather practice your letter sounds? Sitting in a desk or hopping, skipping, and jumping to new skills?
If you liked this learning through movement game, you'll definitely want to check out this gross motor sequencing activity!
This is the perfect sequencing activity to introduce your little learner to the reading comprehension skill of sequencing events.
As part of the kindergarten standards, children need to be able to retell a story including all major events.
"CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.2
With prompting and support, retell familiar stories, including key details."
What comes first? Next? Then? and Last? Those are the sequencing words we use to support 5 year olds to tell the story.
Sequencing and retelling a story can be one of the most complicated things we ask children to do at this age, so by starting with this sequencing activity, we are creating a concrete and fun experience they can reference going forward.
See the picture or make your own sequencing obstacle course.
Your child will be hitting the start button (Post-It), balancing across the line, jumping from tape to tape, crawling along the two lines, and finishing by hitting the end Post-it. You can also change up the movements for each section. We ended up making the rule that you had to keep both feet on the tape in order to get through the obstacle course correctly!
4. Have your child complete the sequencing activity as many times as they like. Then ask them to retell or sequence the steps of the obstacle course from start to finish. If they need help remembering the order, they can walk through the course as they sequence it.
Sequencing can be a confusing skill for little ones but with a clear start and end, along with the blue tape visual of all the movements they did, your child will have greater success in retracing their steps.
The best part is it only took me 2 minutes to prep the whole thing, and we played it over and over again. Your little one can even teach others in the family how to do it, and explaining it to others will be another way they practice sequencing. Give it a try and you'll be working on reading comprehension without even knowing it.
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All I had on a trip to visit my in laws was some blue painters tape; so I created tape shapes to help my children practice names and attributes of shapes while having some fun!
I quickly taped up the floor and watched the ideas flow from their minds. Being bored can certainly bring out creativity, and I was so happy to see them go from begging for screen time to thinking creatively and getting active.
Earlier in the day, we had gone to a beautiful beach on the California coast and collected a mountain of colorful rocks.
With rocks as their newest obsession, the girls started organizing the small stones around the tape. This could be done with any kind of item: cars, pom poms, figures.
Lining up toys is a wonderful quiet time activity, and kids love looking at their collections in new ways. We revisited this one again during the baby's nap.
Never miss an opportunity to turn learning into a gross motor game! For my kids, learning is most fun when they're not sitting down.
With my older daughter (4.5 years at the time), I wanted to build knowledge of attributes of shapes. So, I called out descriptors and attributes for her to find and run/walk/jump to.
With Lil Sis (18 months), she's just being exposed to shapes, I called out names of shapes. She also loves the Sticky Wall Shape Sort.
For a more independent game, the girls played a hopscotch adjacent game where they would run and jump through all the tape. They took turns leading who would be the leader and also tried out different kinds of movements. Some examples kids love: run, jump, hop on one foot, gallop, swim, etc.
Susie from Busytoddler.com uses tape shapes to sort household objects like blocks, books, balls, and more. As kids play they're comparing and contrasting the attributes of shapes as they sort.
Looking for even more ways to play with attributes of shapes? Check out these 3D Shapes activities that explore shape names, attributes, and comparing and contrasting 2D vs 3D shapes.
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In this activity children will create feelings faces to explore different feelings to build their emotional intelligence... Did you know that including social emotional learning activities when teaching can lead to better academic performance?
For so long, schools focused only on teaching academics, but with more and more research, people are understanding the value in teaching the whole child. Social emotional learning helps kids understand themselves and others, leading to better quality relationships and interactions.
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The teacher who cultivates a classroom culture of caring makes students feel welcome, respected, and at home. As a result, in this kind of setting, students are best able to take risks, make mistakes, and learn. Their minds are more open to learning if their basic needs of feeling safe, relaxed, and cared for are met.
The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence has created an effective and systematic way to teach kids about social and emotional intelligence.
Their acronym RULER stands for the 5 skills of emotional intelligence: Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing and Regulating. To learn more about RULER you can visit their page: https://www.rulerapproach.org/about/what-is-ruler/
Parents can improve social emotional learning through the following ways:
The Feelings Faces activity will help children explore the first three parts of RULER: recognizing, understanding, and labeling.
You're going to need Feelings Faces Play Dough Mats for this activity.
Materials: Index cards, play dough, Feelings Faces Mats, and marker
1. Start by asking for background knowledge on the topic. For example, ask, "What feelings do you know?" As your child lists off feelings they know, write them down on index cards. When you are done, have your child pick a card from the pile. (Want pre-made cards? Download them at the bottom!)
2. Together try to make faces of that feeling on the Play Dough Feelings Faces Mat. Discussion and guided questions:
3. If your child is unable to recreate a feeling on the mat, ask them to try to make the face of that feeling, or describe your face when expressing that feeling.
When we build feelings on the Feelings Faces Play Dough mats we are deepening our knowledge surrounding that feeling. Only once we understand the feeling and are able to discuss it, can we recognize it when it's "happening" to us and then regulate it, if needed.
Kids who understand their own feelings have more success recognizing and understanding emotions in other people which can help them have more positive interactions and build stronger relationships.
If your child is having difficulty understanding and labeling their feelings, or the feelings of others, you may want to print out this feelings faces chart. It may also come in handy during the activity to help them describe and create the features that go with each emotion.
These feelings faces flashcards can come in handy in a game of charades, making play-dough feelings faces, or even in a feelings memory matching game. For that last one make sure to print out 2 sets.
