Letter Recognition & Fine Motor Skills!

We are back into the swing of things and I have so many ideas to share with you! One of our new activities is PlayMais. Have you heard of it?! I first saw it at the I Teach K! convention in Las Vegas and I was hooked - first it's a ton of fun and secondly when I ordered it they shipped it to my home so I didn't have to figure out how to fit it in my suitcase!

PlayMais is a German company and the pieces are completely biodegradable AND allergy safe! Even my little guy, Sullivan, who is allergic to EVERYTHING can play with it! Because, you know, at some point, someone is going to stick a piece in their mouths! They're also big on reducing packaging waste, so when my box came it contained nothing but the PlayMais pieces and the worksheet book - no bag or anything, just a box filled to the brim with little cornstarch pieces!

The pieces are about the size of a bean and made of maize, water and food coloring. They stick together and to just about anything when they're damp. The box comes with a few pieces of felt - I get it wet and wring it out and then my students dab their pieces on it to moisten them.
 
My pack came with an activity book with sheets for each letter, numbers 0-10, about 5 pages of shapes and then some mosaic pictures. I decided to laminate my pages to make sure they held up, considering moisture is involved. I just used the paper cutter to chop the pages off the binder ring and laminated each sheet.

Then I poured about 1/8 of my box into a plastic container with a lid and introduced it to my class.

They LOVED it! Seriously, every day this week this center has been FULL! At first they chose the first letter of their names, but after that they started picking letters in their friends names or random letters and it's been great for letter recognition. When the students come to the center I have them identify which letter they want to work on - then we quickly rifle through all of the pages until we find the correct letter. I emphasized that we always start our letters at the top, so it's reinforcing correct letter formation.

My students' favorite part is getting to pick up their sheet when they're done and have the pieces defy gravity and stick to it!

We even got in some math practice because they naturally started sorting the different colors and patterning with them.

This little guy's favorite color is red so you can see he picked out a lot of red pieces :)

Not only is this great for letter recognition, it's fabulous for helping to develop those fine motor skills! The kids use a pincer grip to pick up the pieces and they have to be pretty meticulous to get the pieces into the right spot without knocking the others over. Every student who has come to this center has been successful - sometimes they can only complete the uppercase letter during their time at the center, while others can complete multiple letters, but they have all thoroughly enjoyed doing what they can.

The best thing is that at the end of center time they simply knock the PlayMais pieces off the sheet and back into the container to be reused! Although some have gotten a little smooshed (who can resist pinching a few?!) our container is going to last for ages since they're reusable! Eventually I will add the number cards to the center, and the shape cards and probably by the end of the year I will encourage 3d creation with the pieces, but for now, this is a fun way for my students to work on fine motor skills and letter recognition!

If you'd like to order directly from the company, check out the Education Box here!

I'm off to work on some Penguin Emergent readers - when they're finished I'll announce it on FB and you'll be able to grab them for 50% off for the first 24 hours! Have a great night!

A Fun Activity For Learning Letters/Sounds

I have to share something super exciting for me - my class is doing amazingly awesome in learning their letters and sounds! Right before our break I did an ELQA assessment (our district adopted ELQA for our pre-k classes) on all of my kiddos. ELQA assesses upper and lower case letter recognition, rhyme recognition and production, letter sound knowledge as well as receptive and expressive vocabulary. Not only is my class on target, I have some pre-k kiddos who will make their kindergarten teachers weep tears of joy!

As I was assessing letter and sound recognition, I could tell that one activity we do is having a huge impact! Many of my students would look at a letter and shout out "B is for Braylon!" or "P is for Parker!" and were then able to make the corresponding sound. This all ties back to a power point show I made at the beginning of the year to help us learn everyone's names and to help everyone recognize at least the first letter of their name.

I took a picture of each of my kiddos in front of a black board with the alphabet card with the first letter of their name:

As an example, this is my son Tommy, so for him we would say "T is for Tommy, turtle and toothbrush /t/ /t/  T."

At the beginning of the year I only had my students' pictures in the show.  I have several kiddos whose names begin with J, K or L but we would do each of them the same way "J is for Jack, jam and jellybeans  /j/ /j/  J." followed by the same thing for Jace and Joslynn.

Once we knew all of our freinds names and were starting to pick up the 12 or so letters in the show, I started adding pictures for the other letters. I started with my sons because my students are familiar with them, then added my assistant, Ms. Davis for D. Inevitably though, I had letters that I couldn't match up with anyone.

That's when I took pictures of just the alphabet cards and then added a cartoon character to the picture on my computer. This is HoHo from the cartoon Ni Hao, Kai-Lan. I tried to use cartoon characters that my students were familiar with, which meant a bit of stalking Nickjr and PBS Kids. So we still had each of the students' slides, but now we had a slide for every letter of the alphabet!

We watch this on the Smartboard at least once a day - sometimes more often if we have a few minutes of transition time to fill. This, combined with letter activities from my Alphabet Letter Sounds Pack and my Alphabet Emergent Readers was really helping my kiddos recognize letter. But, seeing the same pictures can get boring after a while, and some of my kiddos were starting to "tune out". So I decided to throw in some random, seasonal friends to renew my students' interest:

Santa and Olaf were added, as well as Frosty, the Grinch and Rudolph!

My students LOVED these new characters, and were once again enthralled for the whole 3or so  minutes of the show.  Obviously once we come back in January,  Santa & friends will have to move on, but in their place will be Tacky the penguin! I'll be updating the show throughout the rest of the year as well - I'm thinking a groundhog, Cupid, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln for February, leprechauns and Dr. Seuss characters in March etc. 

So there we are - a fun way to expose your students to letters and sounds,  but the key is keeping it fresh throughout the year. The great thing is that it takes just a few minutes to add in another slide or delete old ones, so keeping the slide show updated is not a big chore, yet it really makes a big impact!

Why Have A Classroom Elf?

How to Make a Classroom Elf Educational! 

There's been some controversy about having an Elf in the classroom. There's some question as to whether its beneficial in an educational setting. I decided to post about what our elf did in the days prior to our winter break - check it out:

In order to get an Elf in our classroom we had to write Santa and persuade him to send us one:

Santa sent him the next day - wrapped up in an icy cold box. The children immediately deduced that the box had to be from Santa because it's cold at the North Pole (and our Oklahoma weather was warm at the time)!

 

He picked some fun hiding places around the room - and the kids were always so excited to find him each morning - it really set the tone for the rest of the day to start with that enthusiasm!

You can see that he chose to hide by the letter "I" - coincidentally, that is a letter many of my students didn't know when I assessed them. By the end of the day, that statistic had changed :) 

The day that he chose to hang out on our Reading Center canopy, the number of children who chose that center skyrocketed, and they came back all week, even once he had moved to another place! The children explored so many of our books and had great conversations comparing books, "reading" them to each other and having my assistant read to them!

His hiding place on our Smartboard speaker wasn't as inspired - he slipped down behind the board twice! The kids were convinced of his magic when he managed to get himself back up while we were out to recess though!

He always left a note, sometimes in his hiding place like when he was on the rocket, sometimes just under a table or on a chair. Finding the letter was part of the fun! And his letters always mentioned classroom behavior - positives & negatives (without naming names!) and encouraged kindness and following procedures.

He also always sent a present:

The kids loved this notepad and special pen! They practiced writing their numbers, letters and names in their spare time all week!

These "magic spheres" helped reinforce that 3d shape term, and encouraged sensory exploration! Note that putting a lid on the box was not a good idea - they soon turn moldy without the air circulating!

 

The kids loved this "Gift of the North Pole" and used their inferring skills to figure out that the white powder must somehow turn to snow! Although it was too squishy to create much with, they enjoyed scooping it into our buckets and making small towers!

He also brought us 2 floor puzzles - Llama Llama, and Pete the Cat! Coincidentally, my kiddos were ready to move on to puzzles with more pieces and these are 2 of our favorite book characters....
 

He also left us red and green crystal growing kits! Following the directions, measuring the amount of water and observing the results was all great fun (and hit some key concepts!)

I'm so happy Chippy came to visit us - and that we were able to incorporate so much learning into his stay! I've also created a set of 24 notes for an Elf to bring to the classroom! This pack comes with a writing paper with lines and space to draw, and the Elf Request letter pictured at the top of this post. You can grab Letters From An Elf in my TPT store!