Robots!

Look who came to visit us during our last Discovery session.....

A cardboard box robot!

Teaching Your Monster to Read

I've been thinking a lot about activities that parents can do at home with their children to help support their reading development. 

Firstly the high tech version:

Teach Your Monster to Read is a great free website for children to visit. It works best if you complete it along side your child, at least until they get the hang of it. Teach Your Monter to Read focuses on letter-sound knowledge and sight word recognition. They have just released an app too.

Reading Eggs is another great website, you do need to pay to join but they do have free trials so you can test it out first. Again it works best if you sit alongside your child while they work through the activities and drills. Once they are more knowledgeable they may be able to do more by themselves. They also have several apps available, some of which are free.

The low tech version to help children learn to read can be approached from two angles; sight word recognition and letter-sound knowledge.

Sight words are the most commonly used words in text, often they are words that you can't sound out. Sight word games and activities include using flashcards, playing memory, playing snap, hiding sight words around the room to have a treasure hunt with. Click here for some sight word cards to practise with. Choose 3 or 4 cards to start with and as your child learns them add another 1 or 2 at a time until they know each word. Practise every day for a few minutes a day. Most of the early reading books that I teach children to read have lots of sight words in them, the more sight words they know the easier it is to read the books fluently.

Learning the sound each letter makes can be taught with the same type of games and activities. At Totara Park School we use Jolly Phonics to help children learn to recognise their letters. Jolly Phonics is a phonic programme that gives each letter an action and a picture to help children make  the sound. The picture and action mnemonic help children to remember the sound and written letter. (Click here for a copy of our alphabet card.) Once the children know the letter-sounds using the letter and picture cue, give the written letter only and practise that. Start with letters of your child's name, then S, A, T, P, I, N. Introduce a few new letters a week until you are practising all of the sounds every day. Sparklebox have a lot of worksheets you can print out and work on at home together.

So, if your child is struggling, or you want to give them extra support the best thing you can do is listen to them read each night and practise those sight words and letter-sounds as often as possible.

Wheels

It's hard to see in this collage of photos  but we explored lots of different wheeled activities for Discovery yesterday. 

Colour wheels, Benham's disks, scooters, Duplo vehicles, folding car paper-craft, and spinning art. 

At the end of our session I asked the children to tell me something that they discovered about wheels. I think that the time at the end of our sessions is a good opportunity for the children to reflect on what they have discovered and share with their classmates about what they created during the session. Often, we also spend this reflective time to discuss how they solved problems, helped others, or acted like TP Kid.

If you are as excited about the possibilities of spinning art as I am, watch for the next post as we are creating more spinning art works tomorrow!

Happy Halloween!

 

 We had a blast dressing up for our Halloween Discovery session. (The teacher in the cow onesie is not me, but one of the other amazing teachers in J-Block.)

I always try to plan activities that encourage the children to practise a variety of skills and attitudes we use at school. Cutting, gluing, folding, drawing, writing, copying, sharing, turn-taking, persevering, taking risks, and helping others are some of what I observed during today's Discovery session. Discovery allows the children to discover about school, about our topic for the week, and what they themselves are able achieve.

Have a look at some of the activities we explored today:

 

 We blew up balloons and drew jack-o-lantern faces on them. I bought 90 orange balloons to ensure we had enough!

 We made paper-towel mummies, spider thaumatropes, folding bat cards, skull masks, icky insect wristbands, and tissue ghosts.

One of my favourite activities was using a permanent marker to draw jack-o-lantern faces on oranges. Which we got to eat for lunch, yummy.

We played Toca Boca Monster Kitchen on the ipads. This is a free app where you have to choose food for the monsters, cook it, and then feed it to them. Sometimes they don't like it and will spit it out all over the screen.  (That's the best part!)

Yo, Ho, Ho, Me Hearties!

Thursday 19 September 2013 is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. We celebrated a day early for Discovery today!

We explored lots of pirate themed activities, check it out....

 (Don't worry those are fake tattoos.)

Here are some pirate jokes:

Why are pirates called pirates?
(They just arrrrrgh!)

How much did the pirate pay for his hook and peg leg?

(An arm and a leg!)

What is a pirate's favourite subject?

(Arrrrrrt!)

What are pirates afraid of?

(The darrrrrk!)

What's orange and sounds like a parrot?

(A carrot!)

Father's Day 2013

I hope our dads are ready to receive their amazing gifts this Sunday for Father's Day. The children had a great time making something special for dad or grandad during our Discovery session today.

We have been talking a lot during Discovery about perseverance, and how TP (Totara Park) kids try and try again if something is hard. I was pleased to see the children completing an activity even if it was tricky or had several different steps.

Have a look at some of our fantastic Father's Day activities:

 Portraits of dad with paint.

 Ties for dad to wear to work. All the shapes were cut from paper using special punches, then glued on.

 A paper rosette, each part of the rosette was coloured and cut out separately before being glued together.

 Certificates for dad or grandad from Sparklebox.

 Father's Day cards from Sparklebox.

 Playing My Playhome on the ipads. I love this app, it is just like a dolls house. You can change the clothes on the people, put them into bed, close the curtains, and turn off the lights. If the family feel hungry you can cook them dinner or make lunch.

Playing snakes and ladders with one of our Mountaineers (we call our pre-school visitors Mountaineers) dads.

Talk Like a Robot

We practised talking like a robot today for Discovery. Here are a few of our robot activities:

 

Robot masks, these were perfect to practise our cutting skills with. At the end of our Discovery session we talked about how it was great to see children working together and helping each other cut out the eyes of the mask. It is always nice to see children teaching others. That's one of my favourite things about Discovery, the children have the opportunity to develop cooperative skills.

 Amazing robot construction with reused boxes and drink bottle lids.

 Terrific robot collage, I love how this robot is wearing boots on her (3) legs.

 Using the ipad to feed a furby. This furby was bought in by one of the children in my class for us to discover about.

 Magnets and what they attract or don't attract.

And, these fantastic colourful robots with long stretchy paper arms and legs. Colouring, cutting, and using little fingers to fold paper are all excellent fine-motor skills that we like to support during Discovery. This activity also took a little while and involved several steps. I was very impressed to see children persevering and staying on-task to complete their robot.

Mini Beasts and Creepy Creatures

 We were very busy today exploring and discovering about the amazing world of mini beasts.

  We had lots of magnifying glasses available for the children to use as they got up close and personal to several dead and alive insects and spiders.

 We discovered that the snails leave a slimy trail and stick to glass and each other!

 We matched toy mini insects to line drawings using this Insect Match Up activity. (I got the idea for this activity from another blog but sadly I can't remember which one.)

We cut out praying mantis masks and practised snapping our arms out to catch a delicious fly for our morning tea. Yum!

We played 'Bugs and Buttons' on the ipads. (I love this app.)

We made butterflies using a butterfly stencil, old greeting cards, and bamboo skewers.

We looked carefully at pictures of real spiders, then coloured and cut out our own spiders for this giant web.

I was really impressed with the observation skills and very precise colouring shown during this activity. The children who choose it settled down and worked for at least 20 minutes; looking at the spider illustrations, colouring the spider almost exactly like the picture, and then cutting it out before folding the legs accordion-style. A great achievement for 5 year olds to complete with minimal teacher support.