Skip to main content

Demolition!

We read Demolition by Sally Sutton this week.. The whole book is about the knocking down and cleaning up of a building. We have a crane toy with a wrecking ball so we got the toys out after reading the book to recreate the story. We went page by page and practiced each part. 
Jake was soaking it all up. When he is learning something he is straight faced and very sullen. He is just making sure he gets it all in. I know that he will be reenacting this over and over in play. I have many parents do not remember how to play or they do not know how to teach play to their kids. It is not about teaching but modeling. Kids naturally pick up toys and move them around to play but it is taking play into a deeper level (getting lost in play) that is what kids really need to learn to do. Play starts from experiences- small children play what they see or what they have done. Using literature to extend experiences is an excellent way to extend play.
Jake played with this scene for over an hour. And then when you add the number of times he plays this you are talking days of fun that this book has added to Jake's play.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Name Writing Practice

Jacob did a little name writing practice today. He was asked to trace the dotted lines to write letters for his name. This is good practice with spelling as well. I had him say each letter as he wrote the letter.  As you can see he is very choppy and not exactly on the dotted lines. His motor skills are not quite sharp enough yet to be able to hold the crayon and he especially loses control as he works on towards the end. We also did a Missing Letter Name Practice. Both of these ideas came from Cherrios and Lattes ' Play to Write, Write to Read. These are good ways to practice names and writing. He gets very angry if he thinks he made a mistake. See the scribbling. I have to reinforce that it is ok to make a mistake and that everyone makes mistakes but we just keep trying. Practice is the only way to get better. When this happens I cannot help but think of my former students that did the very same thing and proceeded to throw fits and give up. I hope to help Jacob ge...
1 comment
Read more

Play to Write- Week 3

We participating in a Wednesday Play Group called Play to Write over at Cherrios and Lattes . This is week 3- Write/Spell Your Name.  We started this week's practice with some name tracing. Cherrios and Lattes provides the printable for some dotted letters. She suggested doing rainbow writing with this sheet. I showed Jacob but he was more interested in writing all the Jacobs. I started by modeling on the first name. Then I held his hand and we did it together. Finally I let him do the last three on his own with only my verbal prompts.  He took this very seriously and was very proud of himself! I was surprised at how much he liked doing this activity. He has a long way to go but he did pretty well! One thing I had to repeat was not to go around the o and a more than once. He wanted to go around and around. This is an activity that I think he will want to do again! The next activity was Missing Letter Name Practice. We started by singing a little song I sing fo...
2 comments
Read more

Build My Name

I had some more Styrofoam from boxes and wanted to re-purpose them. I decided in building blocks with Jacob's letter of his name. We have lettered blocks but this is just one more way to see his name and one more way to practice his name. I sliced the styrofoam to make the blocks sized from smallest to largest. This will hopefully help him learn the letter orders. I showed him the blocks and we talked about what word we saw spelled out with the blocks. We then read each letter and sang our song: J-clap, clap, clap, clap, clap A-clap, clap, clap, clap, clap C-clap, clap, clap, clap, clap O-clap, clap, clap, clap, clap B-clap, clap, clap, clap, clap We then knocked down the blocks and I let him play with them to see what he might do.  He just played with them for a bit. I then suggested he build a tower. He went ahead and started building a tower. I told him to take caution and look at the letters to make sure the letters are in the correct di...
7 comments
Read more