How do you know your an Early Childhood student?

Your book bag looks like this……

I have not been posting much due to all the schooling that has been taking place around here. We do school during the day while I go at night to learn how to better school them. That's a lot of school! I think I am leaning more now than I ever did during my school days. I am either grasping the concepts better or the information is just way more interesting than it used to be. I am actually enjoying working my brain. If you ask me that come April when my research paper is due, I might just feel differently!

I am taking 3 classes…….

*Curriculum and Teaching Language Arts

* Advanced Curriculum and Teaching Reading

* Curriculum and Teaching Preschool

The above bag was holding 5 projects which were due last week. To be honest, I loved doing all of them. I would much rather create something than do a research paper! I thought I would share with you a few of the activities I took to class.

We had to bring a cooking/food activity to share with our small group.

I have used this activity many times and my students always loved it! Basically, a child will take a piece of bread and paint something using colored milk. Once the bread is toasted, the colors will become vibrant! This activity is so versatile it can be used in so many ways!Here are some ideas I have used in the past:

* We had a science lesson on mixing colors and the class could paint anything. We also made homemade butter to spread on top. Another science lesson for changing a liquid to a solid.

* I read The Way I Feel and had the class paint a face of the way they were feeling on that particular day.

* During a counting lesson, the child was given a number and had to paint that many dots on the bread.  For older students, they could make dominoes to use for addition, subtraction or multiplication.

*Students could paint a scene from a book.

The possibilities are limitless!

Another assignment was to make a story box. I chose the book The Very Lazy Ladybug.

A story box is an interactive activity to allow students to retell the story. I took a shoe box and spray painted it. I added felt leaves and a ladybug made from construction paper. The white vinyl letters were made using my cricut machine. On the inside…..

I hot glued a piece of felt to the top and made all the pieces to the story with either construction paper or felt. The felt pieces will stick to the big piece of blue felt. For the construction paper animals, I had to place a piece of velcro on the back in order to make them stick. This story box only cost me $1 to make because I  had everything but the felt. Teachers or homeschool parents have to get creative sometimes in order not to empty their wallets. In case you haven't checked lately, teachers make a very poor salary and as for homeschool parents……our payment is made with love!!!

We had to research Math Their Way and create a box of manipulatives. I used this method in my classroom so I already had plenty of supplies. The problem was…... they were all boxed up sitting in our garage somewhere(we are moving in 2 months.) I was not about to search through 50 boxes looking for something I could use. Luckily, I had some pompoms that were readily available. I dumped them in a container and created a Math Their Way activity. 

 Younger students can explore the pompoms on their own. As they get older, they can use them in many different ways. For example, a counting activity as you can see in the picture above.

You can use them to teach addition,

 grouping

or patterns. 

If you are a teacher or homeschool parent, hopefully this will inspire you to look around your house and use what you have on hand. Teaching children can be cost-effective. Now, let me get off of here so I can be better at time management and tackle that long list of things that needs to get done!