Animal Sort

As part of my unit on Animals, I get out my old plastic animal set and some props. The wooden house and barn were made when my daughter was little, but you can use anything that represents a habitat - even just a laminated picture or a Lego structure. The pond is a piece of felt.

I put all the animals into the black bag, then the student says a target word or asks a question (see the prompt below - we were working on using "IS"). Then they pick an animal and choose the correct habitat. Some of my students practiced saying "The (animal) goes in the (zoo, farm, etc).

Sometimes I ask the question. For example, "What animal says moo?" or "What animal lays eggs?" Then I hand them the animal when they guess.

Transportation and Cookie Sheets

Once again, I have to say that a unit study of "Transportation" is rich with ideas - both online, in your own toy box, and in the library. I just wanted to share one nifty idea pinched from Darci, one of our preK teachers. What I have here is a cookie sheet from the thrift store (with a background drawn with Sharpie markers), pictures of various vehicles, cut and laminated, double-faced tape, and a sheet of magnet. A great sorting activity!

One Cut Books

Many thanks to Judy Kuster (who has a wealth of links on her site) for this link to One Cut Books. Kids love having little books they can hold and take home and these are a nice break from the cut-n-paste worksheets.

It would be so easy to make a word doc template for these and just go crazy!

Everybody Loves Animals - Part 1

I suppose we all have tons of activities about animals. Please feel free to post your favorites in the comments. I'm hoping to post several of my very best over the next month.



This was a simple lesson I did with my special ed prek. First, we put all the puzzles together and talked a bit/asked questions about each one. Then I pulled the battery-operated yipping dog from my bag (very high interest as you can imagine!). The kids each practiced saying/touching the words on the sentence strip.

Clothing Unit Part I

There is SO much that can be done with a Clothing Unit! Of course, there are many books, such as "Jesse Bear, What will you wear?" and "The Jacket I wear in the Snow". I'll try to make a book list in my next post on Clothing. I like to do my clothing unit in January, and tie in seasonal clothing as well.

There are hundreds of worksheets and activities I could post, but this clothesline activity is always popular. My students will play this again and again - I get bored long before they do.

I start by 'washing' the clothes in my 'washing machine' (the clothes are in a decorated folder and we just shake them around). Then we go through hanging and unhanging each item. For artic kids, they say target sounds before choosing what they want to hang.

For language, it varies by goals. Here are some things I've done:
-make a riddle for each item
-the student describes what they want and I guess
-students compose a sentence about the clothing or when it is worn
-ask a 'wh' question such as "when do we wear pajamas".

For some of my students, it is quite a fine motor workout as well - clothes pins are pretty tricky for prek!

I made my clothes out of construction paper and laminated them. It might also be fun to go to a thrift store and get REAL baby/toddler clothes to hang. If you'd like to try printing out your own, I've scanned mine in this ZIP file - CLICK HERE FOR CLOTHES.

Here is the TechTalk grid I made for this unit - mostly used as a matching activity.






Please leave a comment if you have other ideas for using clothes for unit activities.

Fruits and Veggies

Here at my school we have a "Category of the Week" and this week's is 'vegetable'. I'm always surprised at how many of my students don't know the difference between a fruit and a vegetable. By the way, I don't even touch the whole tomato controversy. So, I made this game to go with a cut-n-paste fruit/veggie sort that I made and I also read one of the many veggie books out there - like David Wiesner's June 29, 1999

The game has a spinner and some produce cards the kids have to 'harvest'. Just click on the image to enlarge - the game is pretty self-evident as far as how to play. We make sentences, etc. I just pinched images from Google.

Down the picture and text file HERE.