Archives for October 2011

Farm Themed Station Ideas Using Items Found At Home

These are some other basic station activity ideas that I have included in a farm-themed My Obstacle Course for Andrew. The great thing about them is that I used things that I already had at home so this is another reminder to look around in your child’s stuff to see if they have toys that fit with the theme you are doing. When doing my own “treasure hunt” for this theme I found a farm puzzle, his Fisher-Price Farm set with the animals, some plastic animals we accumulated somewhere (possibly Michael’s), and some farm-themed books.

Farm Puzzle

Puzzles can be done in a variety of ways, depending on what your child is ready for.

Put the puzzle together ahead of time and remove several pieces. When the child gets to the station, they put the pieces that have been removed into the puzzle. This helped us tremendously because Andrew would get overwhelmed at all of the pieces in front of him, not quite getting how to look for edges and corners. When he put the pieces into the puzzle, he felt as proud as if he had done the whole thing and the next time I would remove a few more pieces to challenge him a bit more.
Separate the edge pieces from the middle pieces. Create the frame first before strategically introducing the other pieces. With beginner type puzzles, this is not difficult to do. Just look for pieces that fit in the spaces next to the edge pieces and hand them to your child.
Complete puzzle in the typical fashion.

Fisher Price Farm

While this is meant for more pretend play, you could make it a more direct activity by having your child place the animals in their correct spaces, having them make the sounds that the animals make or match the animals with the animal name written on a card or cutout. For these, I would probably incorporate some sort of mystery pouch so that they have to reach in, choose an animal and then do the activity. Doesn’t take much to make it more intriguing! Here is a post I did a while ago on mystery pouches.

Plastic Farm Animals

Provide clues for the animals that you have and have your child match the animal that goes with the clue. (Ex. What kind of animal likes to roll in the mud? Pig!) I would use the same mystery strategy I mentioned above.

Farm Books

Books can be read as a read aloudÂ (where the adult reads while the child listens or vice versa), read together (adult and child read together or take turns reading pages) or talk about the pictures and point out things on the pages without reading the text that is on the page. This can be as easy as saying, “Where is the barn?” or “Point to the cow.” Include some post-it notes so you can label these items (without ruining the book) to add word and picture connections.

I encourage you to go on your own treasure hunts and see what you can find. Remember that things don’t always have to be used in the way they were originally meant to be used. Get creative! Think simple! Remember to meet your child where they are and build the skills they need.

Engage, Encourage and Empower!

Help the Baby Chicks

This station activity is perfect for a farm-themed My Obstacle Course. All you need are some colored puffs (yellow works great for baby chicks) and some tweezers or ice tongs. I had some brown shredded paper that I placed into a baking pan because I thought it would help in pretending that they were still in their nest.Â I also had a picture of a hen from a Mailbox Teacher Magazine but you could draw your own (you would laugh if you saw what mine would look like) or simply print one fromÂ of the internet.

My Obstacle Course Station Activity: Help The Baby Chicks Get Back With Their Mom

This activity is simple. Have your child use the tweezers to get the baby chicks (one at a time) back to their mom. Since I am always looking for ways to build pretend play, I suggest adding some pretend play dialogue, such as “Oh no! The chicks are still sleeping in their nest and their mom is looking for them. Can you help them get back with their mother?”

Using the tweezers or tongs helps to build hand muscles necessary for handwriting and even eating with utensils. Here is a past post that I did on tweezers.

Engage, Encourage and Empower!

Farm Themed Sticker Story

When I purchase things to use in My Obstacle Courses with Andrew, I LOVE it when I can use them for multiple activities. Here is just one example of how easy it is to create a completely different activity using something as basic as package of stickers.

I had some farm stickers, which I used for a farm themed memory match game…

P1040979 — Farm Themed Memory Match Pairs

and decided to create a fill in the blank story using them. At the time, Andrew was 4 and since he wasn’t yet speaking, I wanted to know if he knew which animals made which sounds. This gave me the perfect opportunity to find out since I could read the words, say the sounds and he could select the animal that went with it.

My Obstacle Course Station Activity: Farm Themed Sticker Story

For this station activity, I typed up some basic sentences with a space provided for a sticker to go, printed it out, set out the stickers for Andrew to choose from and that was it.

This is what I wrote (so you can see it’s not rocket science 🙂 ):

Out in the country, there was a little red ___ (barn). There were lots of animals on the farm. There was a ___ (horse) that said “neigh!” There was a ___ (pig) that said “oink!” There was a ___ (cow) that said “moo!” There was even a ___ (scarecrow) that didn’t say anything, but scared away the birds.

Once at the station, I read the sentence and had him pick the sticker that best fit. He peeled it off of the sheet and placed it onto the paper on the line provided. This was not only reinforcing his knowledge of animals and their sounds, it was also fine motor skills of peeling and placing.

This activity can be adapted to any theme that you are doing, doesn’t take long to prepare and is a good way to build vocabulary or provide information about a certain topic/thing while keeping your child engaged in the process.

Engage, Encourage and Empower!

Autumn Themed “Make This Number”

I first did a post sharing this activity in September (Apple Themed Make This Number) and wanted to share how easy it is to updateÂ this station activity simply by using some colored index cards and thematic or seasonal stickers.

For the autumn-themed number cards, I decided to use colors that represent autumn for me – red, orange and yellow (you could use any cards or colors that you’d like), and I used some apple, pumpkin and leaf stickers. If this is too busy for you or your child, you could use just one color of index card or one kind of sticker for a set of cards (ex. a set of apple number cards, a set of pumpkin number cards and/or a set of leaf number cards).

Here is the set of cards I made:

P1040996 — Autumn-themed number cards 1-10

All you need to do for this activity is decide the total that you’d like your child to make, get pairs of cards that make that number, mix them up and set them out. (For a more detailed description of this station activity, check out my original post Apple Themed Make This Number.)

My Obstacle Course Station Activity: Put two cards together to make 9

P1000115 — Andrew counting the stickers on two cards to see if they equal 9.

P1000120 — Andrew putting the final two cards together to get 9.

My Obstacle Course Station Activity: Put two cards together to make 10

Alternative Activity Idea:

These cards could be put together in pairs to build concepts like “more” and “less” through questions like, “Which has more, apples or pumpkins?” Throw in a “greater than” or “less than” sign and you can build yet another skill! See how something so basic as colored index cards and seasonal stickers can really help to build math skills in a fun, kid-appealing way? Love it!

Engage, Encourage and Empower!

Autumn Themed Vocabulary and Picture Matching

When I begin working on putting together a My Obstacle Course, I choose my theme and then as part of my preparation, I usually head to Enchanted Learning to see if they have anything I can use to build literacy or math skills. This is an example of how I used one of their thematic vocabulary sheets, altered the look of it a bit and created an engaging station activity to build vocabulary!

I began by printing off the sheet which is meant to be a “draw a line from picture to word” activity. While I love the pictures and the concept, as I mentioned above, I wanted something a bit more fun and interactive.

P1040986 — Autumn matching sheet (vocabulary and pictures) from EnchantedLearning.com.

I got out a leaf-shaped pad of note paper that I had gotten at Teacher Heaven…

P1040988 — A pad of autumn-themed note paper.

Cut out the pictures and glued them onto the sheets of notepaper. I chose to write out the words instead of cutting and gluing the ones from the original sheet but you could do that if you’d like. I laminated these with clear contact paper so they would be more sturdy and last longer, but you could also use index cards instead.

P1040990 — Close up of what a matching pair looks like.

When I set up the station activity for our Obstacle Course, I set out the pictures and put the words in a pile below (shown below). I did it this way because I wanted him to see the word, hear the word and be able to place the word on the picture. If you have a child who is already reading or is ready to build word reading skills, you could do it the opposite way and see if they can locate the word based on beginning sound or knowledge of how the word is spelled.

P1040991 — My Obstacle Course Station Activity: Match the word with the picture.

P1040992 — The word "pumpkin" matched with the picture of a pumpkin.

This could also be used as a Crawl and Match activity (as we did in the station shown below).

My Obstacle Course Station Activity: Crawl and Match the words with the pictures.

It might just be me, but doesn’t this version look a bit more kid-friendly and fun than just sitting down with a sheet of paper? Still building same skills (minus the “drawing the line” skill) but much more engaging.

Engage, Encourage and Empower!

Autumn Manipulatives

You have heard me mention the word “manipulatives” many times and in case you don’t know what they are, they are basically items that children can manipulate while working math problems.

Here are some manipulatives that are perfect for an autumn themed My Obstacle Course:

Seasonal items from Michael's Craft store — Some colorful, plastic pieces from Michael's in the shapes of acorns and leaves.

These are great to pair with math equations to help the child have a good understanding of what the exactly they are doing – what the numbers represent and what it looks like. I think this is so important in building a strong math foundation.

Example: 4+2= ? Have your child get 4 things and then 2 more before counting them altogether.

Really simple but so often neglected as people try to get children ahead by starting them on flash cards and working to know the facts by memory before there is a good understanding. This becomes quite apparent when the child cannot explain what it is they are doing or how they came up with their answer.

Uses:

one to one correspondence
addition
subtraction
multiplication
division
patterning (if you have items that would work as patterns)

These are just some fun, seasonal items to use as manipulatives and I encourage you to be on the lookout for other items that can be used. I’ve got a bunch that I will share soon that are great for a Halloween themed My Obstacle Course – stay tuned!!

Engage, Encourage and Empower!

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