Structured Play

Stay tuned, we are back to blogging and sharing activities to do with your children at home or within the classroom. Life gets in the way but finally, with the request of followers, I have decided to get back to blogging and sharing.    My boys are older and have different academic needs. I have started working again and am loving being in the field again but I have quickly learned that I need to be overly organized at home. This is my  closet. It is where I keep my teaching materials and office supplies.                                                 More to come...

This is our Alphabet Puzzle. It is a great puzzle for practice with the alphabet because it shows a community and community members that work. This sparks interest and discussion while putting it together. Joey is not interested in doing activities that he thinks are learning activities. So he is able to have fun and practice motor skills while still learning identifying the letters of the alphabet.  Now I helped Joey find the next letter by singing the ABCs. I was also able to help him find letters by telling him what the picture looked like. Ie: M is a mailman look for the mailman, now look at the letter at the top, that is an M. There it is complete. Joey would not be able to do this alone but was more than willing to do it with me! Eventually he will be able to do it alone!

Sorry, we were out of town for a week and although we did do some activities from our Structured Play plans, I did not get a chance to post. Here is Week 4 Plans... Week 4 Beach Theme

I gave Jacob a bag of shells to count. He said it would take a year to count all 7 billion shells in the bag. I told him he could organize the shells to help him. He decided to organize the shells by the look of the shell. I let him do it and just said, "that is one way to do it." He quickly lost count and started over numerous times before telling me he could not do it wil us in the room, we were too distracting. I suggested he organize them in another way to count. He couldn't possible think of any other ways to organize the shells and was getting frustrated so I stepped in. I suggested we put them all together again. He did not like that idea so we kept them in 3 piles. I suggested we do one pile at a time and put them in small groups of 10. Explaining it would be easy to count by 10s. (He does know how to count by 10s. He liked this and put all 3 piles of shells into groups of ten by himself. He ran into a problem when we did not have for a pile of ten. I suggested we...

I gave Jack our color buckets again. (Target dollar station) and some sponge fish. We stuck to 4 colors this time. I modeled how to match the color to the box then placed them in the box saying the color. He did it with a little guidance then quickly lost interest and carried around the boxes to play. He used the fish to dump and refill the boxes. Sometimes he would put them in the coordinating boxes other times he would not. The whole activity lasted about 5 minutes.

Joey and I worked on letter recognition and letter sounds with this easy game. (Link to site on week two plans) I wrote the letters into the colored circles. We rolled a die and moved our pieces to the letter.  Once on the letter we said the letter name and the sound or a word that started with that letter. This was as much a number activity as a letter activity. Counting the dots on the die and counting the spots on the game board. The whole game took about 10 minutes. 

We are getting into Week 2 of our summer Structured Play activities. Here are our plans, we are continuing with the Beach Theme. Week 2 June Structured Play