The Building Block Center

The building block center is essential in a pre-kindergarten classroom. 
Students recreate structural environments and explore concepts taught 
through math, geometry, and structural engineering in this center.

Why blocks are important for early learners to play with:

• Block Building and Make-Believe for Every Child by Strasser and Koeppel (pdf.)
• Back-to-Basics: Play in Early Childhood
• Constructive Play: A Value-Added Strategy for Meeting Early Learning Standards (pdf)
• learning library: block play studies

Stringing Beads at The Early Learning Center

      Stringing beads will help your little one develop small motor skills. However, it could also teach him or her even more! Teach your children to also make patterns with the beads. The patterns can be about color, shape or size. By learning to mimic patterns and/or design their own, young children practice a very significant pre-literacy skill; words and sentences have shape, length, pattern and location too!
      Just left, you can see that one of my young students is learning to make patterns and also to follow directions. During her assignment, she was required to string the beads according to the instructions of the lead teacher. She had to listen carefully, concentrate on the order of colors and determine the size of each apple shaped bead in order to complete the assignment. This was a more advanced variation of the stringing project she was asked to perform last week. Every time she completes one stringing activity with confidence, she will be given a new slightly more difficult stringing assignment to accomplish. Step-by-step she will be taught increasingly more complex procedures and by the time she enters kindergarten, she will be ready to 'string' letters from the alphabet together in order to read and write sentences.

      If stringing beads is too difficult for your child, replace the string with pipe cleaners. The chenille stems are stiffer and therefore, easier to poke through beads. When teachers, parents or anyone really, makes concessions for the limited abilities of  students, teachers call this adaptation scaffolding. As this little girl grows and her motor skill develops, she will be able to string beads with a shoe string and eventually a needle and thread. 

• 6 Scaffolding Strategies to Use With Your Students
• 8 Strategies for Scaffolding Instruction
• The Purpose of Coloring Pages

"In this in-service suite teachers learn ways to help 

children when they struggle to learn a concept or 

complete an activity. More information is available

 at http://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/hslc/tta..."

Name Recognition Encourages Early Reading

Just a few of the name tags belonging to students at our school.

      Our lead teacher hung a small magnetic board approximately two to three feet from the floor so that it would be accessible to small students. Next to it stands a little table with a basket. Inside the basket are name tags belonging to each student. Each name tag is representative of a theme that we celebrate every month. Everyday, upon arriving or leaving school, preschoolers are required to sign in and out by either removing or adding their name tags. This encourages the students to focus on the spelling of their names. It also introduces them to the concept that letters, when grouped together, have meaning. At the end of each month, students are allowed to take their name tag for that month home and are encouraged to play with it on their refrigerators.

B is For Button and Also CORE

      As you can see, early learners do practice following instructions and manipulating materials by large degrees of difference. On the far left, this student is just beginning to learn how to hold a small tool; dipping a Q-tip into glue and pasting down the tiny buttons presented a real challenge to him. The middle student filled his entire paper with the tiny buttons with both the confidence and delight of child with advanced motor skills. The student on the far right, however, is completing the project by the most advanced literacy means. 

      It is clear that she understood her teacher's vocabulary and directions because the students were asked to glue the buttons inside the shape of the letter only. This direction was not given in order to establish an aesthetic interpretation of art, but to determine if the young students understood the concept of "inside" a letter shape versus the "outside" of a letter's shape. Establishing the visual boundaries of the alphabet is one of the primary literacy skills taught to early learners. 

      Often parents and some teachers mistake the agenda of art activities in preschool.  They believe that their child is being judged by standards of personal taste, when in fact they are not being assessed by cultural aesthetic preferences at all. Art serves a wide variety of purpose in schools and should never be interpreted by agenda that is superimposed by outside observation. Parents can learn so much about "how" their child is learning concepts just by asking the teacher a few key questions:

• Is it important that my child colors in the lines? If so, why? 
• Is this exercise teaching more than motor skill?
• How is art used to teach my child literacy?

      It is also important for parents to know that at the early stages of development, there are no absolute wrongs in the manipulation of art activities. The students are just beginning to explore and learn with the materials. They are also spending much of their time learning how to listen to language and how to follow directions and what words mean. This takes time and patience on the part of adults. Do not openly judge your child's work with phrases like, "Oh look her work is so much better than his" or "I guess little Johnny just isn't as good as Alex in art." Your child can hear you make these kinds of judgements and develop an idea about his own competency far too early in his own life experiences. Try to involve yourself in his explorations with an open mind to possible discovery. Wait to verbalize any opinions. Sometimes just describing the activity is enough with phrases like: "Wow, you smeared a lot of blue paint!" or "It must be fun to glue pasta onto paper, I thought is was only for eating!"

       Our students range from ages 3 to 5 in the early learning center. At this stage of their development, they are learning preliteracy skills. There are literally hundreds of methods and means to use when teaching preliteracy skills to very young students. I will share as many of these in my ABC Daily journal as I am able to note during my teaching experiences at the school. A few of these activities are precursors to CORE standards adopted by my home state of Missouri. The CORE standards begin at Kindergarten, not preschool. However, preschool curriculum can be designed to compliment CORE initiatives. I have listed below the few kindergarten standards addressed by the activity we completed with the letter B last week.

Reading: Foundational Skills - Print Concepts:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RF.K.1d Recognize and name all upper- and lowercase letters of the alphabet.

Speaking & Listening - Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.K.4 Describe familiar people, places, things, and events and, with prompting and support, provide additional detail.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.K.5 Add drawings or other visual displays to descriptions as desired to provide additional detail.

Below are the agenda covered by the lead teacher during this simple preliteracy lesson:

• The teacher introduced the letter B to her students.
• Students repeated the sound of the letter after hearing their teacher make the sound herself.
• The teacher discussed the shape of B with the students.
• The teacher then asked the students what familiar things started with the letter B.
• The word button was introduced as beginning with the sound and the literal letter B.
• The teacher then showed her students a printed sheet with a capital letter B. 
• Students were instructed to glue buttons inside the letter B using a Q-tip, white school glue and a wide variety of colored plastic buttons.

Common Core State Standards listed above © Copyright 2010. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved.”

Four Easy Ways to Develop Small Motor Skills in Early Learners

    

      These jumbo sized plastic tweezers are perfect for developing hand muscles in tiny pupils. They have large easy to grip handles and require the child to apply a considerable degree of pressure to ensure firm control of the object he or she is moving. These two factors are important because the tool needs to be safe but also effective in gradually increasing strength of a small child over a period of it's use. 

      Early learning centers often supply activities that require the use of tweezers such as these. The tasks appear to be almost too simple on the surface until you pick up the tool and squeeze it between your pointing finger and thumb. This is not such an easy task for a two or three year old. In order for the tool to work, however, one must supply ample opportunities for it to be used on a daily basis.

    

    Tracing both around a heavy cardstock stencil as well as inside of one is an excellent way to build up a child's eye-hand motor coordination. Very simple shapes should be used to begin the exercise with. Then the instructor should gradually complicate the stencils in order to build dexterity and patience in the student. 

      As the child ages, teachers may then ask him or her to cut out the shapes they have traced with the stencil. The progression of this technique will cause students to constantly focus and adapt their abilities to task. 

      Above are examples that I would expect a fourth grader to successfully cut out. However, a third grader should have no trouble with tracing around or inside these shapes. Younger children should be given geometric stencils and also be taught the names of their shapes in preschool.

      Lacing cards come in every shape, size and theme. These are also easy to make with clipart, a whole punch and heavy cardboard. The lacing cards pictured above are coated with a durable plastic so that they will endure heavy use; some lacing cards are actually made of wood. Students may use yarn, ribbon or shoe laces to string in and out of the holes around the pictures. 

      The literal act of pushing a lace through a small hole forces a child to manipulate tiny objects in a restricted way. These movements are early preparation exercises for writing. Hand control skill learned with this toy will help to insure that similar control over a pencil. Like many small motor exercises, lacing cards must be repeated daily in order for it their benefit to be substantial. Parents, teachers and child care providers should encourage their young students to lace cards, pinch with tweezers and draw around stencils for at least ten minutes every day up until they have mastered handwriting.

      Above is a zipper purse designed in the colors of a rainbow. This zipper purse is very easy to manipulate and is probably better suited to an infant. Dolls and quite books made with zippers, buttons, shoe strings, snaps etc... are also very popular toys designed to develop eye-hand coordination in young children.

More Related Links:

• Fine Motor Skills from prekinders
• Everyday fine motor play in preschool
• Ten Kid's Activities to Practice Fine Motor Control
• OT-Fine motor skills links by Virginia C.

Develop Small Motor Muscles with Clothespins and Paper Plates

Our students have been working with clothespins in order to better develop their small motor skills.

      Young children have untrained fingers as well as underdeveloped muscles in their hands. The simple act of pinching down on a clothespin with one hand and attaching this to a paper plate can be very difficult for them. In the photo above, our lead teacher has drawn a funny face on a paper plate and printed number cards for a game using clothing pins. The pins represent the hair. Every child draws a number from the center stack which tells him or her how many clothespins to attach to the paper plate. The students were fascinated with attaching the clothespins over and over, even though it proved difficult, none of them wanted to give up with the exercise!

• Play the outdoor game of clothespin tag
• clothespin number and letter match-up game
• Clothespin color matching game

Use a Light Table to Teach About Colors and Shapes

Above is the light table in our early learning center. The table is softly lighted with special bulbs that do not harm
the children's vision. This is a lovely center idea but I think that a number of games should be developed to
compliment the device. Our students often appear disinterested in it. Sometimes teachers must become
more proactive in centers in order for small children to get the most beneficial use from educational props or aids.

      In our classroom we have a center for teaching colors and shapes that is a little unusual I think. It consists of a light table (very soft light) and a basket containing wood framed, plastic shapes. These shapes glow with luminous color when placed on the light table. Students can move the shapes around to build pictures; teachers can point to the colors and shapes to identify them verbally. I think it is fitting for a church preschool center. The shapes remind me of stained glass. Our church windows also have similar shapes and colors. Perhaps I should invent some sort of treasure hunt or find the shapes/colors game for my young students that will utilize this table more and also introduce them to seeing colors and shapes in the environment that shelters them?

More Methods To Teach About Colors and Shapes:

• Why Colors and Shapes Matter
• Teaching Colors and Shapes to Young Children Through Music
• Teaching color and shape vocabulary with games
• Learning Station Idea for Colors and Shapes
• Color Wheel for Toddlers and another aid for increased manipulative difficulty
• Teaching shapes and colors Christmas theme
• Color sorting and matching for toddlers using pom-poms
• Gumball Machine Color Matching with Craft Pom Poms
• Color Sorting and Matching Activities for Toddlers
• Tot School - Red
• toddler "busy bag" swap!
• Sorting Colors and Shapes
• Shape Monsters
• Five fun ways to teach with tape

The "Act" of Tearing Develops Small Muscles

      Sometimes the simplest of activities can be challenging for a young student. It took quite a while for this little one to tear her red construction paper into pieces in order to fill in an outline of an apple. She was so proud of her picture afterwards. The muscles in her hands are still developing but training such as this distracted her from the arduous nature of the task. Because art doesn't feel like work to the young, teacher's often use it to enhance child development.

The simple act of tearing construction paper may present a real challenge.

More Torn Paper Crafts:

• Candy Corn Craft for Fall Activities and Halloween
• A torn paper bunny for Easter
• Torn paper animals based upon Eric Carle's "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See"

Eating Should Be A Happy, Healthy Experience!

These little tikes sure can eat; they consume as much food as the teachers!

      Lunch time is a happy, healthy experience at our little school! Students may either bring their lunch from home or order their lunch from the big cafeteria at the middle school. The hot lunches are brought special delivery to our classroom everyday. Children sit together in a pleasant environment. No loud distractions or music is played during this time. Students say a little prayer before eating and are encouraged to have pleasant conversation while dining. There's no rush; food is consumed at a leisurely pace. Lots of fruits and veggies are included with the lunches too. Two teachers eat with the students at their table to ensure that an adult is always available should a child begin to choke.

Pinchers Not Grippers!

      Did you know that the way your preschooler holds his or her crayons will affect their handwriting development in the future? Some students experience difficulty in manipulating a pencil when they begin to write in kindergarten. They "grip" their pencils as though they are holding a baseball bat. Ouch, that can cause writer's cramp for certain!

      Parents can help their children by training them early without even seeming to pay attention to the problem. That's right! It is an easy fix, but you must be willing to fight the schoolroom taboo. You must break their crayons. Yes, I understand that this is considered transgression across all kiddom but one must make sacrifices for the good of many or maybe just a few, for a limited time only. When little people are forced to hold tiny crayons, they will pinch not grip. This is an automatic result and also an easy way to break bad little habits.

• Handwriting development for small children
• How Handwriting Works
• Helping Children Develop Handwriting Skills
• Correct Pencil Grip

Developing A Seating Chart for A Rug

A giant oval carpet at the center of a spacious preschool depicts a pond full of lily pads, letters, numbers and one frog.

This seating chart is made from simple pocket
envelopes. Frogs are labeled with corrisponding
letters and numbers found on the rug above.

      The first day of preschool and children are given assigned seating on the rug! No, the seating is not permanent; it changes every day. As the young students arrive, their homeroom teacher, Jenn, gives them a choice between a letter or a number. She then proceeds to hand them a frog pop-cycle stick with the same number or letter to match their selection. Then each student puts their frog inside a  pocket labeled with their name. Not only does this little routine help young students to focus on a place to sit whenever they are called to the rug, it also begins to teach them letter and number identification. This year our classroom is full of three, four and five year olds. Some of them have yet to learn all of their alphabet or to how to count to ten. But they are well on their way with the staff at our small private school!

Creative Circle Time Seating:

•  Preschool circle time idea - Grab a spot
• "Camping" Campout at Preschool

More Related Content:

• My child won't sit still at circle time. What should I do?
• Watch a video of circle time in a private kindergarten