Back to School Freebie!

Since I love spending my summers obsessing over school, I've made lots of word walls to use with all the themes in my classroom. Here's a great one to start the year- school words in Spanish. There are 20 total words.

Click here to download.

Never fear, dual language teachers, there is also one in English!

Click here to download.

If the back to school bug hasn't caught you yet, enjoy the rest of your break. Even if it has, get a little relaxing in before you head back!

What's in an ABC Center? Alphabet Puzzles!

photo credit: mag3737 via photopin cc 

My district has several required centers for pre-k classrooms and most are the centers everyone knows and loves. Art, dramatic play, library, blocks, writing, math, science, technology. We also have a something called the ABC Center. Is that basically what it sounds like? (you may find yourself asking). Well, yes! It's a center designed to encourage exploration of the letters by focusing on just them. Sure, children are (or should be!) learning about the alphabet throughout the classroom and all during the day. This is just an additional way to ensure that children have great meaningful experiences with letters every day. 


So what goes in an ABC center? My first suggestion is something that is ubiquitous in early childhood classrooms: alphabet puzzles. Many look at that puzzle and see a few weeks of use followed by a covering of dust that grows each month, but this item can actually give you a lot of bang for your buck.


For example, you can start by putting the letters in a container and have them pull the letters one at a time from it to place in the puzzle. When they are finished, they put all the pieces back in the container. I like to start with an empty wipes container because they can't see what letter they're pulling out so it's very exciting and fun. Plus they're free! I guarantee you somebody you know can give you a baby wipe container.

Change up the container with your themes, with seasons, with holidays. Put them in a pumpkin in the fall, a basket in the spring, a dump truck when you're studying transportation, a big shoe when you're studying nursery rhymes. Find anything they'll fit in and go for it! It's an easy way to use that puzzle for all it's worth and since you are spending time talking about letters every day you will see those children start to say the names of the letters, think of words that begin with those letters, make connections with those letters, try to spell words with those letters.


Shari Sloane has some great ideas for alphabet puzzles, including one I'm excited to try out next year. She gets an alphabet die, one of the 30 sided ones with every single letter. Children roll the die and find that letter to put in the puzzle until it's full. My alphabet die is from an old version of the game Scattergories that was going in the trash at an old job. Always check the trash!


Put the letters into a feely box, bag, or empty tissue box and show children how to reach in and try to guess the letters based on how they feel before pulling them out to put on the puzzle. This is a great way to get children to observe the attributes of letters, which is crucial for letter recognition and formation. If I feel a straight edge, can it be an "o?" Why or why not? 


Get a container and mix an object or picture for each letter with the letter pieces. Children first put all the letters in the puzzle then match the objects or pictures and simply place them on top of the letters. It's not fancy, but guess what- your kids haven't seen a Lakeshore catalog; they don't care. It's fun, it's easy, and it's cheap!


Make some word cards to use with that puzzle. You can make them to match what you're learning or to teach high frequency words. Just remember not to choose words with any repeated letters!


Use a set of alphabet flash cards with pictures for each letter with your puzzle. Children pull a letter from the puzzle and match it to the card.


To incorporate writing, have children pull a letter from a container, write it in their journals or other paper, then place it in the puzzle. This is something I'd do after the class has had several months of exposure to the puzzle and to writing letters. I want them to have plenty of purely tactile experience with letters to set them up for writing. That said, when children are comfortable with writing letters this is a great way to get some fun practice.


If you want to get really snazzy, get a lowercase puzzle and an uppercase puzzle and mix up all the pieces in a container. Now students have to identify each letter as upper or lowercase before sorting it into the correct puzzle. 


Would you have believed there are so many ways to use a humble alphabet puzzle? I love items that can be used in multiple ways and levels and for that reason, alphabet puzzles score high in my book. The fact that any of these activities works for English or Spanish literacy is just icing on the alphabet cake!

Here are links to some of my favorite alphabet puzzles. (Apparently Lakeshore has discontinued the two I use most often, so maybe they are creating something new and even better.)

Foam puzzles like these are usually easy to find at dollar stores or bins at Target.

Melissa and Doug have great puzzles in English and Spanish and I have found all of these at Mardel:




-Spanish: http://www.melissaanddoug.com/Spanish-alphabet-peg-puzzles-educational-toys

-Spanish talking puzzle:  http://www.melissaanddoug.com/spanish-alphabet-sound-puzzle-wooden

-English: http://www.melissaanddoug.com/see-inside-alphabet-learning-puzzle

-English talking puzzle: http://www.melissaanddoug.com/alphabet-sound-learning-puzzle

Dice, Dice, Baby

Dice are so much fun! Pardon me, random number generators are so much fun! There are a bazillion different kinds to choose from and if you're like me you can't help but buy them all. (Look, green dice! Better buy them. These have hearts instead of dots! Better buy them. These are slightly larger/smaller/heavier/lighter than the ones I already have! Better buy them.)

I've seen so many great ideas for containing dice (random number generators) around the web and have tried a few out. I use the giant foam dice at the beginning of the year because they need to be able to touch each dot to count it, but later in the year we can use regular sized dice! (This activity and photos are from February of the past school year.) This opens up so many more possibilities to Pinterest-obsessed educators like myself.

I used some very small containers that I most likely bought at Dollar Tree and were most likely in the craft section. The lids are difficult to remove, which is a plus when a 4 year old is shaking it like her life depends on it. That reminds me- putting dice in containers adds a whole new level of motor skills to the activity. They can flail their arms back and forth with all their might, all in the name of mathematics!

Here are my random number generators in their containers. See how small those containers are? 

I recommend using containers with tightly fitting lids. I also tried another type of container with less success. These are probably easier to find and come with a lot in the package, but you'd need to glue the lids closed if your students are anywhere near as vigorous in their shaking as mine chose to be. Or you could just show them how to use them more gently. We'd already gone full shake so there was no going back for us!

There are infinite possibilities for how to use the dice, but here was our first activity which just so happens to be a math journal activity. I know a lot of folks are encouraged to use math journals in the early grades and a lot of those folks aren't sure how to fill those pages. In my classroom the answer is to fill them very simply. Teaching children to record their observations and data starts small but is a great advantage to them and their knowledge of math.

This activity was done in small groups with me. Some groups worked on drawing the dots then writing the numeral that went with that quantity of dots, while others rolled dice with the numerals and drew that many dots. Both of these end up with the same things written down, numbers and dots. I didn't show the children how to record their answers first, I simply said to record their numbers and dots in their journals. It was interesting to me to see how the children decided to draw.

That's really it. After introducing this activity with all my small groups I put several dice from my inappropriately large collection in the math center where children were free to repeat the activity on their own. It was a hit! The thing I enjoyed most about this activity was that it was a perfect set up for future games involving dice and recording data. Plus everyone loved it, so it was a win for all!

Construction Theme

We just finished up a month-long construction theme in my classroom. Here are some things we did to learn more about one of my favorite subjects- building stuff! I would say these are some of the "highlights" but really they're just the "things I managed to photograph."

We talked about the parts of buildings and structures and the children drew and labeled houses. They've been working on drawing houses basically all year, so most of them turned out pretty well. We do a LOT of labeling and it's a great way to add some print to any type of drawing or art project. This project was done in a small group with my assistant. This child is in a group who is working on writing and reading syllables. (Notice the hobbit-like windows of this house.)

One week was devoted to learning about tools, so we made a graph of our favorite tools. It's important to me that my students get plenty of vocabulary in English as well as Spanish, so I make sure to include as many thematic activities as possible during math (which is taught in English). For this graph the children drew a picture of their favorite tool and copied the word. When the children make the graph themselves they are much more likely to utilize the graph during centers and at other times of the day. I hung this graph in our construction center and they counted and compared the tools to their little hearts' contents.

Here are some closeups of some of the individual tools. We've worked hard on learning to draw this year and I'm very proud of what they're able to do now that we're 2/3 through the year.

Also during our week on tools was this ever-so-fancy project I've decided to call "draw, color, label, and cut." I got the idea from a colleague and discovered there's really nothing you can't draw, color, label, and cut. This activity is great for a bulletin board or other display and gets the kids excited about labeling and cutting (because they're just not excited enough about scissors already, right?).

By the way, I highly recommend giving your students interesting tools that they can actually use, like levels and tape measures. Every year my students L-O-V-E using levels with the blocks and end up checking random objects around the room to see if they are level or not.


Here are a few more random activities from the construction month.

Nuts and bolts

Locks and keys (hey, it's construction-y!)

Toy screws and hinges, which just happen to fit perfectly on the backs of our shelves

So there you have it, a bunch of jumbled ideas for learning about construction. Next up will be transportation, and I will be more mindful about taking photographs this time!