Fun With Pattern Blocks

After watching the children have so much fun with the colored tiles that came as part of our RightStart Math kit, I decided that they needed more shapes to play with. I found this set of pattern blocks on Amazon for about $5-10 less than all the other sets. It shipped quickly and the quality is great. I don't know why it costs so much less, but I'll take it.

Then I found an amazing set of printable patterns at Prekinders. She has the patterns in color version and in black in white. I printed them in black in white. It is a bit more challenging for the children and saves color ink.

When we first started the children were really frustrated because their pattern blocks kept sliding around. I cut some large pieces of contact paper from a roll I got a while back and taped them sticky side up in front of each child. This allowed me to slide the patterns under the contact paper. They could build their designs and then slide the pattern out from underneath to see the pattern. You can also just slide blank paper under the contact paper and let them make up designs of their own. I played too. We all had great fun and our kitchen table has been taken over for two days now.

Craft Stick Catapult

Michael's eyes light up every time I pull out the tally sticks (craft sticks) as part of our math program. He'll play with them for 15 minutes after the end of a lesson and wanted to use them for art projects.

So when I saw a box of 1000 at the store I got it so I wouldn't need to ration the craft sticks any more.

As the amazingly creative person that I am, all I could think of to make with the craft sticks was this:

Let's just say the children were underwhelmed and leave it at that.

So I went searching the internet for something to wow the children with and I found directions for building a catapult out of craft sticks. Perfect! We spent a very happy two hours building and playing with the catapult. Since then, Michael has slept with it - twice.

After the initial fascination wears thin I think we'll do a few experiments with it. I'll gather a variety of items and we'll guess which will fly the farthest. We'll change out the rubber band for longer and shorter versions and see how that changes the performance of the catapult. We'll take measurements of our farthest shots. So many learning possibilities.

Mini-Bingo Strips - Phonics or Speech Game

The reading program we're using (which I will review soon - promise) wants us to practice reading words that begin with the letters d, h, p, b, r, and s followed by i or a and ending with t, p, n, m, g and d. They provided a flip book format for that practice, but I wanted to do something a bit more creative.

First I made the word wheel which is fun, but only gets you so far. I wanted to make a game. I decided to make a kind of mini-bingo game.

I made strips with five of the six beginning letters on them. Then I made several sets of all twelve possible word endings. Finally I took colored dots to match the six colors of the beginning letters and stuck them on a die.

I roll the die and call the color. Anyone who has that color on their strip gets to pull word endings out of the cup (and practice reading the word that is made when the beginning letter is combined with the word ending) until they find one that makes a real word. We repeat the process until someone has made words for all of their letters and calls "Bingo". They win the game and then we get to start over. The game is simple and the strips are colorful. The game goes quickly enough so you can play several times and everyone gets a chance to win.

It seems like you could use this same game for speech practice by putting initial or final consonants you want to target on the strips and making your word endings (or beginnings) simple sounds that the child can produce easily. You'd just need to be working with children who are at least early readers. I'm sure their teachers would love the bonus phonics practice. If I wanted to use this game with Michael for speech, I'd make the beginning sounds /f/ and /s/ on different colored rectangles. I could use the same word endings I've already printed. Even if the words turned out to be mostly nonsense words it would still be great speech (and phonics) practice.