Bring the mirrors outdoors and enjoy this simple and rewarding activity! During the early years, children are enamored with their own reflections. Providing this opportunity to study themselves, and create art, encompasses many different skill sets for young children.
Infants: Infants will enjoy simply looking at themselves in a mirror. Offer a hand mirror on a blanket where they can gaze and practice tummy time!
Toddlers: Help toddlers label their own features in the mirror. Encourage them to explore different art materials without concern about the final product. Focus on correctly holding utensils (pencil between fore finger and thumb).
Older Toddlers: Encourage older toddlers to recognize simple shapes in their features and transcribe those shapes on their drawing. Encourage correct handling of utensils, and help children write their names.
Pre-K: Encourage children to write their names and label their features when finished with their portraits.
Have you tried self portraits in your program? Have a fun activity? Share it with us info@townsquare.org
Early Math Collaborative is a part of Erikson institute dedicated to providing math resources and professional development for educators and administrators.
The collaborative recently launched Download format; making resources available for immediately download and printable for everyone.
Enjoy these at-home activities cards to help children explore numbers, shapes, sorting and more!
At-home activities cards are available in English and Spanish
For many of us, winter is sticking around for a few more weeks, which means more fun in the snow. Remember, there is no such thing as bad weather; there is just bad clothing.
Playing outside during cold weather is very beneficial for children.
It builds resilience, helping children learn to cope with uncomfortable or challenging situations, and builds mental and emotional strength.
It improves creativity and imagination; being outside provides endless imaginative play and exploration opportunities.
It promotes physical activity, playing in the snow, and engaging in winter sports like sledding, skating, and skiing supports physical activity and healthy habits.
Lastly, it enhances sensory experiences; snow, and ice provide unique sensory experiences that stimulate and calm the senses, helping children develop sensory integration skills.
Stephanie McKinstry owner of Caterpillar Clubhouse Nature Preschool, shares some fun photos of her program enjoying the snow!
Exploring textures is an excellent activity for toddlers.
This simple activity encourages curiosity, the development of hand-eye coordination, and language development in describing textures. You will need a few materials to get started.
- An empty tissue box works best, but any box will work; just cut a hole in the top.
- Place a variety of objects inside the box. For example, shiny ribbons, scarfs, feathers, shells, rocks, bark etc.
- Encourage toddlers to explore the box’s content by using their senses. Model what this looks like, rub the fabric on your hand, smell it, rub two items together, and be sure to describe what you feel and see.
Have fun and alternate the material in the box to explore more textures!
August and September are big Sunflower months around here. If you happen to put sunflowers in your bird feeders, you likely have sunflowers all over, even some in strange places.I like to let most of my sunflowers live their long lives, but every once in awhile one pops up somewhere and I have to pluck it out. Also, at some point they all die off, and they can be quite unsightly. Instead of just composting the giants, I try to use these opportunities as teachable moments. Here are a few activities you can do with sunflowers.
Weeding/ Ages 3-99
Engage children in assisting in the removal process. Weeding requires a lot of gross motor skills. Using several muscles in unison, and stimulating brain activity. Children enjoy the satisfaction of pulling as hard as they can, and it’s great for them to see the progress of their efforts. Once pulled, help them remove the stem, the leaves, and the flower, and place the different parts into labeled bins to explore next.
Sunflower exploration/ Ages 0 – 99 / Fine motor skills, Scientific knowledge/ Math
Offer sunflowers to children with a variety of tools such as plastic knives, mallet, tweezers, water, different containers. Encourage the children to explore the sunflowers using the tools. Offer some safety guidelines if necessary. Then, let them go at it! As they are exploring you can scaffold their learning by asking questions or offering new techniques.
Sunflower painting / Ages 1 – 99 / Fine motor skills/ Creative Arts/ Early Math / Science
Create the art area by laying down an old sheet on the grass. Offer each child a canvas and a sunflower. Squirt desired colors of paint on canvas and encourage children to use their sunflower or hands to paint.
Seed counting / 2 -99 / Math
Use tweezers or fingers to extract seeds from flower head. This process alone is really cool! The textures of the sunflower are varied and interesting. Count seeds by 1’s, 5’s, and 10’s! Make up a recipe “We need 30 seeds to bake our bread!”
Cooking! / 2 -99
After you have counted, painted, smashed, and tweezed the sunflower pieces, cook with them! Flower petals look gorgeous on a mud pie, and children will love having new textures to work with.
Changing activities throughout the day can be challenging for children. This handout from the Center on the Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning (CSEFEL) gives some helpful ideas about being proactive when it comes to transitions to help children become independent in moving between activities over time.
Math at Home is an online professional development site with resources and information about engaging young children in conceptual math activities.
“Math at Home builds the knowledge and skills of home care providers, teachers, and parents to help them:
- Set up environments that promote math literacy
- Facilitate math activities and lessons for young children
- Learn about mathematical concepts necessary for teaching young children”
Check out all the resources at the M.A.T.H.: Math Access for Teachers and Home Child Care Providers website.
PEEP and the Big Wide World is a web-based resource (associated with the public television show of the same name) that highlights STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) experiences for preschoolers. The website offers free resources in Spanish and English for parents, early childhood teachers, and family child care providers — including videos, online games, apps, activity ideas, teaching strategies, a blog, and more! Check out some of the teaching strategy videos featuring family child care providers here.
Let’s be honest. Worksheets, cookie cutter craft activities, printables, and plastic manipulatives are widely reviled by early childhood education experts, yet they are widely available and often used in preschool and child care programs. At a recent luncheon with early childhood professional development providers and authors, we tried to sort out why this problem persists and consider why it is so hard to bring the clear messages from research into play in classrooms.
Day in and day out we see posts defending “play based learning” yet, in classrooms, we are seeing limited conversations, low quality play and content-poor activities. Why do these differences exist? Who are the people (teachers, caregivers and administrators) who really do implement developmentally appropriate practice? How are they different from the people who don’t use D.A.P.? Is there a gap in knowledge about what D.A.P means and how it influences lasting learning outcomes? Is there an informed rejection of the D.A.P approach to early education? Are old ways too hard to give up? Are sales pitches from websites and catalogs so irresistible? Do standards, QRIS systems and the Common Core play a role in this discrepancy? Are we wrong to ask these questions? Here are some of the developmentally inappropriate examples we use in our workshops:
A winter project that showed a teacher-cut shape of a giant mitten on which children had glued cotton balls. Doesn’t look like a real mitten, doesn’t function like a real mitten, isn’t made of anything a mitten would be made of. And, even worse, no connection for students that live in warm climates or students who live in the northeastern U.S. where no one needed mittens till after the first of the year. This allows no creativity, no meaning, no learning value and even no potential for play. Doesn’t help children understand winter, doesn’t help them understand mittens. What choices would have been better?
Making “goop” or similar substance with 2-year-olds. It doesn’t mix like anything else you would mix. Has no purpose – can’t be eaten, molded or used so mixing the ingredients doesn’t lead to any understanding. When you’re done – you just throw it away. Teachers have defended this by saying “but we just want the children to experience different things.” Or “sensory”. But the truth is, there are so many real things for them to experience that will help them understand the world around them while also being fun and sensational – why choose this instead of mixing sand and water to make a structure or mixing two colors of paint to make your picture? What choices would have been better?
Dinosaurs. How often do we hear – “Kids love dinosaurs and D.A.P. says we should follow children’s interests!” Very tricky… but kids love a lot of things so you don’t have to pick dinosaurs. What do we have against dinosaurs? They don’t exist. There are so many animals in the child’s real world that could be studied and identified and cared for that would have real world meaning. Why choose dinosaurs that are only seen as plastic toys or cartoons? What choices would have been better?
Handing out black paper and orange paint in October. No choice allowed for children, yet no meaning to the activity. Stripes of orange paint do not help them understand what a pumpkin is or how it grows or what it looks like on the inside. But this is also not art. There is no creativity or independent thought or opportunity for rich, engaging conversation. What choices would have been better?
A poster in 3-year-old class with the sign language alphabet. When children do no yet know any alphabet, hand spelling doesn’t mean anything to them. Pictures of hands in different positions are not going to support “diversity” because they have no relevance for the children nor will they signs be used in the classroom. USING sign language for words like eat, drink, toilet, hurt, more and stop could be a more useful strategy to help children of all languages and abilities understand. What choices could have been better?
Precut red and black ladybug with counting spots. Gluing circles of paper onto other precut paper has no meaning. It may look like a ladybug to an adult, but to a child it is just something to copy for no purpose. Counting the spots has no meaning if there’s no value to the number of spots. What difference does it make if there are two or four? It matters if you have two cookies and your friend gets four. It matters if the puzzle has four spaces but you only have two pieces. It matters if you have two feet but only one shoe. What choices could have been better?
Printable coloring page with leprechaun. Is this really what you want children to learn about Ireland and Irish culture? Is coloring a printable picture of a leprechaun providing anything to discuss or create or imagine? What is the holiday of St. Patrick’s Day? What meaning does it have for children? Is this just cute or is it quality? What choices could have been better?
Skill-based activities with no real content. You can teach sorting plastic things for no purpose and be pretty sure the children can’t generalize to any real life items that need to be sorted. Or you can teach sorting by asking the children to help you find the pieces for each puzzle from a pile of puzzle pieces, or sort the markers that work from the markers that are dried out, or sort the newly washed clothes for the dramatic play area. True D.A.P. based on the research tells us that skills and letters and phonemes should be learned in the context of useful, authentic content. An activity that teaches nothing more than sorting doesn’t really teach sorting either. An activity that involves playing with realistic items that need to be sorted teaches content and vocabulary as well as a lasting, generalizable understanding about sorting. What choices could have been better?
Voices of professional development presenters:
Rosanne Hansel, PA pushes kindergarten teachers to look for deeper meaning and purpose when choosing activities, not just counting for the sake of counting.
Barbara Capra, NJ asks her teachers “Is it cute or is it a quality early learning experience?” She advises teachers to evaluate activities by looking at skills/standards/objectives, time, implementation and the source to really be sure they are making the right choices for young children.
Liz Vaughan, PA, asks teachers to know the difference between art and crafts, but she recognizes the value of predictable, developmentally appropriate routines.
Pam Brillante, NJ, asks teachers to “step away from the Pinterest” because young children, particularly children with disabilities, need learning that connects with experiences they recognize from their daily life rather than isolated activities.
And, these connections to real things and experiences are even more important when teaching young children who are dual language learners! This is one of the reasons these questions seem so pressing right now.
We find it so difficult to help teachers give up activities they’ve been using. They put a lot of energy into defending the old ways instead of using that energy to learn new ways. How can we help? How can we make our writing and our workshops more effective? How can we reach out to those old websites, app developers and Pinterest pages that keep publishing inappropriate materials and activities?
The questions we want teachers to ask are: What for? And What more? In other words, when choosing any activity, can the teacher explain what the children will learn from it that they can really use? We don’t mean to just imitate, or experience, but actually use in their life? And if they find that the activity does provide some learning experience that the child can really use, can the teacher identify related activities that will extend the learning and allow the child to put his new learning to use? Teaching kindergarteners to identify a picture of an asteroid may seem like science, but if they never use that word again or see anything to do with asteroids or have any asteroid activities again for the rest of the school year – they won’t remember it. What for? and What more? Can these questions help early childhood educators break through the D.A.P Gap?