Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Simple Organizing

Maybe we split a hot chocolate while we decorated.

I know this is late, but I am still going to post an activity from December, because I am always late and because you all understand. 

One of Ty's beloved activities is making connected rings from construction paper. It is easy and we can decorate the playroom (our basement) with whatever color correlates with the season. He likes doing it so much that we change colors several times a year: green/red for Christmas, red/pink for Valentine's Day, purple/yellow for Easter and on and on. That is actually what got me started doing this - colors. It was a simple way to teach him colors. 

We have since moved on from colors into organizing and math skills. The math skills are pretty easy to recognize (counting, counting by tens, etc.), but what about organizing?
1. We had to separate the paper from the rest of the colors in the construction paper pad.
2. We organized all our supplies: scissors, stickers, stapler.
3. We sorted the cut paper into piles.
4. We planned out our teamwork. Ty made an assembly line of putting stickers on (we used the free ones from the mail) alternating colors. I stapled them together (he's not big enough for a stapler yet).

Separating piles of colors, and those with and without stickers. Plus, teaching Za colors.

The high school English teacher in me sees this as applicable to future use, such as writing a paper (of course). He can separate the information pertinent to his thesis, organize his information, divide it into paragraphs using an outline, and then assemble the paper.

Anything to add? I feel like I am missing something beside color identification, math skills, and organization.

4 comments:

  1. What about identifying shapes? It looks like you have some circle stickers and some rectangles!

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  2. Patterns! ABA or ABBA or ABC (if you start using 3 colors) Also, you count the number of strips of paper you use, maybe simple graphs??

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  3. Use the strips to introduce him to length - long, longer, longest. You could even pull out the ruler and show him how measure. Let him lay down and see how many strips it would take to make up his height. Etc.

    {I’m on my own personal blog hop, trying to send smiles to strangers and turn strangers into friends: http://www.honeyandcheese.com/2011/01/12/the-ultimate-blog-hop/}

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  4. This is why I need math friends. :) My literature-tilted brain can only think of so many ideas, and very few of them are related to math.

    I want to say we did shapes, but I can't be for sure. Meghan, do you think Ty can do a chart yet? If you say, yes, I'll trust you and go for it! He loves (loves!) patterns, but I know we did not do it with this. The length idea is fabulous, and one that has never occurred to me. I can see my son enjoying it, though.

    Thanks for stopping by everyone! These are great ideas and like I said, I do not think of these math related ideas, even though I wish I did!

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