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Land, Sea, or Air?
Description
Sorting and classifying objects not only helps children make sense of the natural world around them, but it is also an important mathematical and scientific inquiry skill. When children begin to learn about different modes of transportation and think about how people move from place to place, it is a wonderful opportunity to introduce three geographical terms (air, land, and water). Use this printable to sort vehicles into these three categories while also strengthening those cutting skills. In the Playful Learning studio, we also love to have a collection of small vehicles nearby, perfect for tiny hands, to name, sort and classify. You can also use our Transportation Three-Part Cards.
Materials
- Printables
- Scissors
- Glue
- Optional: Vehicles (On the Road, In the Sky, In the Water)
Books to Inspire
- Transportation by Gail Gibbons
- Cars and Trucks and Things That Go by Richard Scarry
- Transportation by Alain Gree
Join us over at Teachers’ Lounge and enjoy or complete Transportation unit!
Growing a Sense of Place at Your Farmer’s Market
Have you considered just how much place shapes our lives? It influences our attitudes, values, skills, and behaviors.
We have explored “sense of place” a bit together here at Playful Learning – what it is, why it’s important, how to nurture it. I love thinking of sense of place as not only one’s interactions with the environment but one’s personal dialogue with it. We each create unique life stories based, in part, on our experiences with our environment and our interpretation of those experiences. As I ponder what sense of place might look like for each of my children, I become more and more aware of the individual strands that may be getting woven together to form their unique stories. One of those strands for our family is the local farmers’ market.
Most communities have farmers’ markets, large or small. Does yours? Do you visit, even if only occasionally? Children can learn a lot at farmers’ markets – color recognition, social skills, math concepts, etc. – but sense of place? Yes! Farmers’ markets are not only a showcase of the results of our community members’ hard work but a display of what the land on which we live and depend can support. I grew up near the coast where fishing and boating were a way of life. My husband grew up inland and further north where children were let out of school to help with potato harvesting. My children are growing up in an area surrounded by family owned farms. They can see where their food is grown and raised and can even harvest some things themselves.
So whether your community has a flourishing farmers’ market with an abundance of offerings or a small market that features mostly baked goods and herbal concoctions, you and your children can learn a lot about your place and what makes it unique. To help your child grow his or her sense of place at a local farmers’ market, bring the printable below and have fun exploring!
Saying Goodbye to Summer
As August comes to a close and the month of September approaches, “back-to-school” is likely on the mind of every family. Planning ahead for the school year is important, and there are numerous resources with tips for a smooth transition. But with transition in mind, this momentous time of year can remind us that we are not only looking ahead toward a rich school year, but also looking back and saying goodbye to the summer and whatever it brought for yourself and your family.
How can you leap into September while also celebrating the summer and recognizing the special months we have passed through? Whether your children will return to traditional school, a homeschooling year, or something else entirely, there is something powerful in honoring what has come before.
Routine and rhythm are important for children of all ages, along with family traditions. Family traditions help give children a sense of order and a sense of place in the world, as well as a strengthened familial bond. When approached with intention, traditions can help children foster a relationship with themselves, as well as family and the world at large.
This can be the year you introduce a new family ritual of saying an appreciative goodbye to the summer months before bounding ahead into the high energy of another school year.
There are countless ways to curate your own family goodbye to summer, but the most important factor is to make it meaningful for you.
Perhaps there is a special hiking trail, campground, or beach the entire family can return to one last time before school starts. Summertime is full of outdoor pursuits, so try to find a way to bring the outdoors into your ritual.
You might spend a day preserving summer fruits for the chilly months ahead, or engaging in other cooking or baking with summer ingredients. A shared meal of seasonal food would be a powerful tradition to begin. You could also preserve summer flowers or herbs by drying them or pressing them in books.
With your children, you could create a memory book of the past summer with photographs, ticket stubs, memorabilia, quotes, family jokes or anything else that reminds the family of fun times. Another twist on a memory book could be a summer nature journal, detailing any outdoor adventures and including descriptions and pictures of various flora and fauna that were discovered.
While thinking about the past summer, you could invite everyone in the family to write down or share aloud a favorite memory. Ask each family member what he or she learned this summer, or how each person has grown.
There may have been challenges over the summer, and while it can be tempting to ignore the harder times, these moments or events should also be recognized, perhaps with the intention of letting them go.
Another element of saying goodbye is, of course, acknowledging that there is change ahead and something new is on the horizon. An end of summer celebration could also include wishes for the coming school year or intentions moving forward into the new season. Write these down, and either keep them to look at next summer, or toss the scraps of paper into a campfire. Another evocative ritual is to make a wish or visualize a memory while tossing flower petals or stones into a stream.
However you choose to shift from summer to fall, try to make that shift meaningful this year. How can you send off August with intention, while welcoming the months ahead?
DIY Games for Kids: Word Mastermind
Do you have a Scrabble® game in your home? If so, put those letter tiles to use with this simple game.
You will need:
- Letter tiles
- Playsheet printable
- Blank sheet of paper
- Pencil
To Play:
A – player 1: secretly writes a 5 letter word with no repeating letters on the blank piece of paper. (for the photos, I have put the secret word on the wood tile tray.)
birds – one letter only
☒nests – two S’s.
B – player 2: using the letter tiles, lays down their guess of a 5 letter word (with no repeating letters).
C – player 1: if any of the letters are in the secret word, player 1 slides down the letter(s) to indicate that the letter is somewhere in their word, but not necessarily in that position.
D – player 2: crosses out the letters NOT in the hidden word on the sheet. Using the discovered letter(s) as a clue, player 2 uses the tiles to make another guess being careful not to use the letters now marked on their sheet.
E – continue until player 2 guesses the hidden word!
This compact game is great to take traveling or to play on a quilt in the backyard!
7 Ways to Encourage Summer Reading
Now that summer is in full swing, it’s time to take stock of how our children’s summer reading is going. It’s so important to soak in all of the sights, sounds, and experiences that the summer season holds, yet by incorporating some fun reading routines into your daily rhythm, you can ensure that your child will head back to school without having had the dreaded summer slide.
With this in mind we compiled seven simple ways for you to keep your family engaged in meaningful reading experiences throughout the sunny summer days…
Clockwise from top left:
Playful Learning August Book Clubs
Selecting Just Right Books for your Reader
Enjoy a Picture Book Project Together
Make a Pocket-Sized Library List
Enjoy!
To help the process along, we are offering a Summer Reading Flash Sale with 20% off of our August Book Clubs!
Offer Ends Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Post Office Invitation
A post office is a fun theme that can be used to enrich other themes such as a holiday, or after a Birthday when your child is writing thank you cards. Post office play also can easily branch into subjects like Math, Geography and Environmental Studies.
Here is a list of props that you may like to include in your child’s post office:
- Mailbox: Make your own from a cardboard box or purchase a mini metal mailbox from a craft store, dollar store or online.
- Envelopes, writing paper, cards, postcards: make your own cards or print these free envelope, writing paper and draw your own postcard templates.
- Stamps, mailing labels, air mail sticker: can be found at your post office
- Address book, phone book, map/globe/atlas: the tools that we use to locate the person we are mailing a letter to
- Child size mail bag or uniform: don’t forget a name tag!
- Mail sorter
- Post Office signs: Open, Closed, Mail here, Postage Costs, etc. Great for writing practice!
- Coins, cash register: ring in the math practice!
- Scale, tape measure: introduce measuring skills
- Clocks: post offices often have clocks set to times all over the world – label the location on a sign below each clock
- Pens, notepads, “cancellation” rubber stamp, ink: kids love to stamp the envelopes to “cancel” the stamps
Ways to support learning:
- Teach your child his/her address
- Make your own stamps by cutting small drawings with fancy edge scissors or by using this stamp punch.
- Weigh and measure packages
- Reduce junk mail by looking into a no junk mail program in your country
- Start a stamp collection
- Visit your local post office or your country’s postal system website
- Share old postcards from your travels with your child and look up the location on the map
- Discuss the pros and cons of electronic mail verses paper mail
Books to read with your little ones:
- Owney the mail pouch pooch – Mona Kerby
- Here Comes the Mail – Gloria Skurzynski
6 Games to Play With Your Child at the Museum
Nuria from the The Adventures Archive is here today to share some great ideas for learning through play at art museums.
Are you visiting an art museum with your children this summer? Here you have some ideas to make the most of the visit.
1. Start the visit in the souvenir shop. Let him choose a few postcards of the museum’s collection and then invite him to find them around the museum. Once he has found them all, ask him which one is his favorite and why. Tell him to write those reasons to the artist on the back of the postcard. Pretend to post the card. A few days later you may surprise him with a reply postcard written “by the artist”.
2. Bring props: Look at the paintings through a kaleidoscope, a fly eye pair of glasses or a magnifying glass and have a laugh together.
3. Mixing art: At home, draw lines on an A4 drawing paper to divide it into squares (if your child is very young start with just 4 squares, for 6+ children try at least 9). Once you are in the museum, let your child copy the top left part of the first painting in the top left square of the paper. Move to another painting and let him copy the top right one. Continue the visit, filling a square with each painting. You’ll end up with a fun and quirky mixed work of art.
4. Continue the story: Choose a painting and let your child look at the scene for a few moments. Then start “Once upon a time there was…” and describe the scene. Then, turn it over to your child and ask him to continue the story. If you have more than one kid they can take turns so they come up with a long story.
5. If you visit a museum of abstract art, ask your children to guess the title of the paintings. My daughters come up with the funniest titles like “Super Dot” or “The Clumsy Squares”. They marvel when I tell them that the real title is something like “Sunset” or “The Cow and the Moon”.
6. Create a character: Choose a portrait and let your child imagine who this person was: What was his name? What did he do? Where did he live? Back home, if it was a portrait of a historical figure, do some research with your child so he can learn the real story and compare it to the one he had imagined.
6 New iPad Apps for Little Ones
Rebecca from Thirteen Red Shoes is with us today to share some great new app recommendations for kids.
- Miximal and Drawnimal. Miximal is new on the app market, however Drawnimal has been around for awhile. I adore how both of these applications have a strong animal focus as well as education for little ones. Drawnimal encourages drawing animals after seeing the animation and learning letters of the alphabet and Miximal is all about mixing up animals to create a unique species! Adorable. Both are created by Yatatoy.
- Hip Hop Hen have a delightful early phonics series of three applications: ABC songs, ABC jigsaw and ABC tracing. All adorable in their own right and stand alone apps which also work well in conjunction with each other.
- Tap Tap Toink Tap Tap Toink is a musical puzzle for children. Precious and straight forward. This application is purely visual and auditory and has been created for the very young.
- Word Teller An app designed to encourage the listening of sounds and depicting a word form using color cues. You need to drag the letter/sounds to the correct place in the work shown at the top of each page.
- Endless Reader Endless Reader introduces sight words as part of an individual word and then as part of a sentence. The creators Originator Kids also have developed Endless Alphabet and Endless Numbers. These apps also have in app purchases when you want to add additional words or numbers to the package.
- Montessori Math (+ & -) and Montessori Multiplications. Les Trois Elles have recently released two new Montessori inspired applications. These apps are perfect for children who have advanced past one to one recognition and are looking for a little extra extension in this area. There are so many different options available to solve problems from games, quizzes, slate boards, bead frames and stamps. As you progress through the challenges, you accumulate a score which can then be transferred in the Monster Shop to creating your own monster. A lovely reward at the end of a hard math session at home!
Enjoy!
Traveling with the Kids: 4 Tips for Better Packing
Adrienn is with us today with some great tips for packing and traveling with kids.
With spring break around the corner reevaluating our packing habits can be a rewarding process.
I love to travel and I especially adore staying in cozy hotels. To make myself at home I had this ritual of unpacking my suitcase and putting everything away in the available closets as soon as possible. Often ten minutes after I got my keys everything was neatly folded and out of sight.
So it took me by surprise that on our latest trip three days had passed and I still dressed the kids out of their big shared travel bag.
It really annoyed me that it took up loads of room, causing me to bump into it every night. Not to speak of the frustrating moments until I found the garments I was looking for. But I avoided the task. Persistently.
It got me thinking. Did I become lazy? Why did I procrastinate such an easy task that I loved doing before?
Here is what I came up with:
Systems or routines that worked before can become outdated, especially with toddlers in tow. When you realize that you avoid doing something, don’t blame yourself.
Take a step back and analyze the deeper reasons behind your lack of action.
1. Do the math: Block out enough time in advance so you don’t become discouraged.When I traveled on my own I had to unpack only my stuff. Now I need to unpack mine plus the bag of my kids as well. No wonder it takes triple the time. Seems obvious but my sweet ritual became a bigger deal, causing me to procrastinate it forever.
2. Divide and conquer: Store their belongings separate for easy access and quicker unpacking. One big bag for my two kids creates just chaos and doesn’t work anymore. Clothes get mixed up immediately making me resist to put them away. My munchkins will get a personalized travel bag to make things easier.
3. It’s not your fault: You are not lazy and you procrastinate for a reason. There are things you can’t change like available closet space in hotel rooms or guest bedrooms. On our recent trip we had one big closet but a lack of shelves made it nearly impossible to store our stuff let alone the various children clothes. Count on it and be prepared. If your kids have to live out of their bags make the best out of it. Try to put the outfits for each day in labeled zip lock bags. Same goes for pajamas. This works particularly well when they stay at Grandparents. Your Mum or Mother in law will be grateful!
4. Change your rituals: Find out the reason you liked them in the first place and come up with something that still works for you. I had to let go of my desire to unpack immediately as a way to make myself at home. Next time I will try to achieve this goal by giving me one more day and maybe even enlist the help of my little ones…
Now tell me, do you have a special way of packing for trips and is it still working?
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