Archives for September 2011

Pass the “Apple”

This is a super basic activity to set up yet was one of the more challenging for Andrew. I set out a red plastic bouncy ball (the “apple”) for us to pass back and forth 10 times. A red balloon would also work well for this activity and you could make it as big or as little as your child is ready for.Â Of course, I told him that we wouldn’t want to drop it or throw it too hard or it could fall and get bruised (a little pretend play here!).

Activity Suggestions:

Passing
Bouncing
Rolling
Tossing Up

The addition of two dice can help determine how many times this needs to be done, plus helps to build fine motor skills of shaking and rolling the dice while incorporating counting and adding the two numbers together.

Passing:

If this is challenging for your child, begin close together so that they get the practice of hands out and squeezing to catch the ball. I especially liked to use red when Andrew was working on this because it is an easy color to see and track. Once your child gets the hang of it, try it against a wall. It will probably come back faster and require a little quicker reflexes but if they are ready, go for it!

Bouncing:

Bouncing was a huge challenge with Andrew’s motor planning issues so we started with him bending over or squatting while holding the ball so that the ball was only a few inches off of the ground. He would just have to let go and then work on catching the ball which was easier because his hands were right there in a good position to catch. We also did some hand over hand at first to show him how his hands would have to move to let go of and grasp the ball. From there, he slowly worked on standing up a bit more until he got how to push down on the ball to bounce it and then get his hands ready for the catch. We are still not perfect with this but practicing and building from really basic steps helped him understand what his body needed to do as well as figuring out the timing of it all.

Rolling:

A good way to practice rolling is to sit with legs out in a V shape with your child facing you doing the same thing and touching your feet together so the ball cannot roll away.

Note: I am not an Occupational Therapist. These are just ideas and suggestions that worked for us at home while building these skills. If your child sees an OT, ask them for recommendations on how to build ball skills they are working on in therapy at home.

Engage, Encourage and Empower!

Apple Books

Including short books or pages of books is a great station activity in any My Obstacle Course. When setting this up as My Obstacle Course station, I set out two books and have Andrew choose the book he’d like to read. Giving him the power to choose the book has worked so much more than just telling him what we are going to read.

Where To Get Thematic Books

I have accumulated a lot of my thematic books through the Scholastic Book Clubs and the public library or local bookstores are also a great place to get books to go along with whatever you are doing. The Scholastic Book Club is run through a school or classroom teacher. The school or classroom gets points to earn books for their library and the books tend to be at a discount from bookstores. If you want to be able to see the books you are purchasing by shopping at a bookstore, I know that at our local Barnes and Noble they usually have a whole table set up in the Children’s section entry with books to go with the season in a variety of reading levels and types (fiction/non-fiction).

Using books or stories as a station activity helps to build reading skills such as:

Comprehension – this is a great opportunity to point out characters (if fiction), setting (when and where a story is taking place), important information, any problems (a great time to point out facial expressions or body postures illustrated with what is happening), predicting what will or what could happen next and pointing out the conflict resolution (if there was one) or tie back to the information learned from the book.
Fluency – finding a good reading rate where the reader can be understood, no words are dropped or added and punctuation is followed. Andrew tends to run right through periods and will read so fast that he mumbles over words and phrases. Adding a strategy like pointing to words as they are read helps him read the words that are there and saying “stop” when he gets to a comma or period helps him remember what the punctuation means.
Decoding – practicing sight words, spelling words or vocabulary words in isolation with a good deal of repetition is very helpful for struggling readers and having them read passages that are at their reading level is a great opportunity for them to practice their decoding in a purposeful way while also allowing you to see what words give them problems.

I have used these stations as:

a “listening” station to help him build his “good listening” skills
turn taking while reading – he reads one page or side and I read the other which helps to keep him engaged while giving him a break
him reading pages or passages to build his fluency and intelligibility

Helpful Hints For Beginning Reading Skills:

Point to the words as they are being read.
Use a bookmark, ruler, piece of construction paper, reading guideÂ (cool tool!)Â to help stay focused on the line of text being read.
Have a pad of post-it notes handy to write down things learned, new words, words that were challenging and words to define.

Happy reading!

Engage, Encourage and Empower!

Apple Themed Puff Blowing

In keeping with the apple theme, here is a station activity which uses red cotton puff balls as â€œapplesâ€ to blow to build oral motor skills. Here is a previous post,Â Puff Blowing, I did which details why I began using this activity with Andrew.

I like to keep Andrew on his toes when working with him so I placed the cotton puffs and some cut up straw pieces into an eyeglass container so when he got to the station, heâ€™d have to open the container (fine motor skills) in order to see what he was going to be doing. You would be surprised at how well the simplest ways of disguising activities works to keep children interested! Here is a link to a post I did a while ago on incorporating mystery and intrigue into My Obstacle Course stations.

My Obstacle Course Station Activity: Blow the apples across the counter/into the bushel/off of the table.

This activity is really as basic as it seems but because it is part of My Obstacle Course, it became much more purposeful than if I had just randomly said to Andrew, “Blow these puffs off of the counter while Mommy folds the laundry.” Wouldn’t have happened because I tried that. Making it into a station activity, he was willing to blow the puffs which helped build his oral motor skills.

P1020620 — My Obstacle Course station idea: Puff Blowing (he had to blow the various sized puffs to the window)

Modifications

Utilizing different size puffs can help build expressive and receptive language by asking the child which size theyâ€™d like to start with or asking them to blow a specific sized puff and seeing if they choose the one you described.
The same activity could be done with the addition of yellow and green puffs to represent different apple colors (like golden delicious and granny smith).
Different lengths of straws and different sized puffs could also be used, requiring different breath power.

Engage, Encourage and Empower!

Apple Themed One To One Correspondence

Last week I shared how to make your own “Apple” book using a cute, thematic note pad and some basic facts about apples. Today I’d like to share some ways to use this same apple themed note pad (shown below) to build number skills.

My Obstacle Course Station Activity: Show How Many Apples

I created this activity a few years ago to help build Andrew’s understanding of numbers and the amounts that they represent. I decided to begin by combining the numbers with concrete items, in this case, red cotton puff “apples.” I wrote out the number and included the word “apple” on a page and provided the “apples” for him to distribute. At first we did this in order to build number sequencing and then I changed it up by only including some of the pages, not necessarily putting them in order from least to greatest. This allowed me to see if he understood what the numbers represented by showing me without needing to have intelligible speech to do so.

Note: I had a 6th grade teacher who was a stickler on labeling what it was we were referring to. If we didn’t state it as part of the answer, she would say, “5 what? Chickens?!” Her insistence on this has stuck with me I guess :).

P1010269 — Red apple puff one to one correspondence

P1010267 — Red apple puffs matched with numbers.

My Obstacle Course Station Activity: Match the Sticker Card with the Correct Number

I like to start building math concepts with actual objects that he can physically manipulate to demonstrate his knowledge. Once I have a sense that he gets it, we move on. For this concept, we moved on to cards I made that had specific amounts of stickers on them. His job was to match up the sticker card with the number card. This would require him to count accurately in order to match them up properly.

This was so fascinating for me because I got to see how he approached counting – Was he pointing at each sticker or doing it in his head? Did he have a systematic approach or was it more random? Did he start from the top and move across or from the bottom and go up and around?

There were times when he would double count or skip a sticker and match the card up with the wrong one. Sometimes I would ask him if he was sure or ask him to count again but other times I would let him figure it out when he wound up with two sticker cards at the same number. If needed, I would bring out the “apples” for him to place on the stickers to see what the correct answer was. What started out as a really basic one to one correspondence activity turned out to give me a great deal of information and taught him some analyzing and problem solving skills.

This is an activity that takes no more than 10 minutes to create with a pad of paper, a marker, some puffs and/or stickers yet helps build some fundamental math skills.

Modification:

If this activity is too basic for your child, you can adapt it by writing equations on some and sums/differences/products/quotients on other pages for them to match up. I would also begin building these skills with items like the “apple” puffs that your child can manipulate to demonstrate their understanding of what they are being asked to do. I know that fact memorization is part of learning and I am glad that I don’t have to carry around puffs with me to figure things out as an adult (now picturing that cracks me up!) but it is really important that children have a good understanding of what equations mean.

Engage, Encourage and Empower!

Mini Apple Cut-Outs

I’m going to try something different in my upcoming posts. I’ve been feeling like I’m not providing enough prep time by posting on thematic/seasonal things as the theme or season is taking place (would love to hear thoughts on this!). I’ve decided to try bunching some ideas I have that utilize similar materials instead of doing separate posts so that you have more lead time. Hope this helps!!

Mini Apple Cut-Outs

I discovered themed mini cutouts at my teacher supply store and I have to say that I use them all of the time. They are great for reinforcing themes and because they are small, they also help to build fine motor pinching and grasping skills. They do not make the plain apples anymore shown in my photos (that I know of) but the “Dots on Black Apples” from Creative Teaching Press are available and work just as well.

In this post I will share ways I have incorporated them into My Obstacle Course station activities with Andrew so you can see how easy and versatile they are while helping to build academic skills.

My Obstacle Course Station Activity: Apple Sorting by Color

P1040884 — Apple sorting by color - red, green and yellow

Note: Looking back on this, I would use a white crayon or silver photo marker (or different color paper) and write the color names to add a literacy aspect to this. Doing this would allow the child to see “red” where there is a red apple, “yellow” where there is a yellow apple and “green” where there is a green apple. You can benefit from my experience on this one!

My Obstacle Course Station Activity: Apple Graphing

For this station I took a sheet of white construction paper, wrote my title across the top, glued the sample apples on the left-hand side and drew some lines to divide the graphing space. I set out the apples I wanted him to sort and graph and it was all set.

Note – I chose a specific amount of each kind of apple (ex. 4 red apples, 1 green apple and 6 yellow apples) so I knew that we would have a “most” and “least” amount of apples. Other graphs we have done have incorporated “equal” or “the same” amounts.

Andrew labeling the graph with "Least" and "Most" cutouts.

You could take this one step further and have your child glue the apples onto the paper. I chose not to have that as part of this station because my focus was on building math graphing skills and knew that Andrew’s enthusiastic gluing would have taken away from that.

My Obstacle Course Station Activity: Apple Patterns

For patterning activities, I begin by starting out the pattern and provide the pieces necessary to complete the pattern properly. Once I feel like he gets the pattern, I throw in some pieces that don’t fit to get him thinking. He can show me that it does not fit by not using it and explain to me why it does not fit in the pattern.

My Obstacle Course Station Activity: Apple Tree Number Order

This is great for building number recognition and number order. I took a sheet of brown construction paper, drew a tree (isn’t it pretty? 🙂 ), made some dots in rows to indicate where the apples should go and wrote numbers on the apple cut-outs (we were working on 30-40 here).

Super simple activity! Here is a sample conversation of how I would do this with a child:

“Can you find the number 30? Here it is! Put that one on the first dot. What comes next? 31. Great! Let’s keep going until all of the apples are in order on the tree. Done! Let’s count to make sure that they are all in order. 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40. Good Job!!”

See how useful these little guys are? Love them!!

Engage, Encourage and Empower!

Make Your Own Apple Book

This is a super easy fact book you can make at home to go with almost any theme. It can be made with themed note paper (if you can find it), index cards or just sheets of paper – whatever you have around your house. It really is so easy to make something that can build basic literacy skills as well as provide information – in this case, information about apples.

My Obstacle Course Station Activity: Homemade Book About Apples

I used my apple themed note pad (came in very handy for this theme!!) and wrote some basic facts about apples. Nothing fancy but Andrew loved it and even brought in to share with his class!

Some general facts about apples:

apples grow on trees
apples have a stem
apples have 5 seeds
apples are fruit
apples can be big or little
apples can be red, green or yellow
apples can be eaten
apples are used to make applesauce, apple pie, apple juice, and apple cider

This was made and used when Andrew was 4 so it is very simple but if you look at non-fiction books for that age group, this is what they are – lots of repetition to build word recognition and reading confidence.

Note: I used some clear contact paper to “laminate” the pages and clipped them together. I did not want to staple or bind them because I wanted to be able to use them more like cards, even including them as part of a “crawl and get” activity – ex. crawl down and get the next page for us to read.

Engage, Encourage and Empower!

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