Hands-on learning

If you're a current K5 parent, you may have noticed that your child doesn't bring home very many worksheets. That's because we try our very best to make most of our learning interactive and hands-on! Here are just a few of the learning activities we've been doing:

This little scholar is matching uppercase and lowercase letters printed on index cards.

See those green pocket charts in the two photos below? Right now in math, we're working our way through Numbers Bootcamp. Every day, we focus on a particular number. We count it, we write it, we're even introduced to the number word. Students have to select the different pictures that show the number of the day, and we glue them onto a big chart that the whole class can see. When you've got lots of pictures representing several different numbers, it's a skill to distinguish the one number for which you're searching! 

One afternoon, I had the students tear construction paper into small pieces. Most thought it was a lot of fun, though for some, tearing the paper proved to be difficult. Believe it or not, tearing paper helps build those small finger muscles, and this in turn helps improve students' fine motor skills. The next day, we used the paper scraps to spell out our names!

Another day, we spelled words with magnetic letters. We started with our names, then I allowed them to choose any words they saw in our classroom. It could be a word on a wall, in a book ... anything!

These girls spelled ALL the color words!!

Math games are a lot of fun too. One day, Mrs. Shepard scattered pictures around the room that depicted different numbers of items. When students found a picture card, they had to bring it over and place it under the correct numeral.

Once they'd found all the cards, we counted the items to see if we were correct!

Since we welcomed a new month this past week, the students helped me fill in the dates on my calendar. Not only did they have to figure out which number came next, they had to make sure their chosen color fit the pattern.

During Morning Meeting, there's always an activity for students to do. Sometimes it's writing their names or a particular numeral or letter. But these will becomes more challenging as the year goes on.

Our goal as teachers is always to make learning as fun as possible. And not only are hands-on activities a lot of fun, they help the students use and remember the information in a much more effective way!