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Workshop Wednesday: Macaroni as Manipulatives

May 2, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Have you ever found yourself wishing you could afford hundreds, or maybe even thousands of letter or number manipulatives? Head for the pasta aisle in your favorite grocery store—a bag of alphabet macaroni contains both letters and numbers! The pasta is low-cost, so if you have several children who would each enjoy their own supply, you can buy several bags. Letting each student store his macaroni in a large zipper bag will help to make clean up simple and easy.

I sorted through a bag just to see if all the letters and numbers were represented, and yes, they were. My adult-sized fingers found the task a little tricky, but a set of tweezers made it simpler. Children’s small fingers are much more suited to this assignment, and tactile learners will really love digging in. Muffin pans, egg cartons, or cookie sheets are great receptacles for sorting!

Let your students play with the uncooked macaroni at first, and see what activities they devise for themselves. If they need a little encouragement or a starting place, suggest sorting the letters, forming spelling words, making random words (like “magnetic poetry” but without the magnets), or writing sentences. If they’d like to save their work, the words can be spelled out on a line of white glue on a piece of cardstock or an index card. The glue will be invisible when dry, and the cardstock can then be cut into appropriate sizes, creating miniature word-cards (add small magnets to the backs of the cards for even more versatility; a steel cookie sheet makes a good lap desk). These cards can be arranged into sentences, poetry, or lists of rhyming words or spelling patterns, and saved in a zipper bag for another day. Be serious, get silly, have fun with nonsense words, or use the letters to form the answers to lesson worksheets, and the learning will take on a whole new dimension. Don’t stop with just phonics, spelling, and grammar, however. Use these letters to practice spelling place names for geography, complicated scientific words for science or chemistry, or important people, places, and events for history. The letters can easily be scooted apart to break words into syllables or prefixes, suffixes, and root words—a great method for word study, and it adds a memory link for better recall later.

The tiny pasta numbers can be used for sorting and matching or set up as math statements by writing operation symbols on paper, leaving blank spaces for the numbers. Select specific numbers or grab random pieces for a new twist on math problems. Younger students will enjoy the challenge of putting the numbers in order or experimenting to see how many different numbers can be formed from just a few digits. Keep the pasta dry and away from toddlers and the family dog, but rest assured that a new supply is readily available in case too many pieces get stepped on, eaten, or sucked up by the vacuum cleaner!

Filed Under: Activity Ideas, Learning Outside the Books, Learning Styles, Phonics, Spelling, Tactile Learning, Workshop Wednesday, Writing

Workshop Wednesday: Play Money

April 25, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Time to head for the game closet and dig out some play money! This stuff is a fabulous tactile learning tool that can be used for much more than just collecting $200 for passing “GO.” Use play money to practice counting by 1’s or skip-counting (by 5’s, 10’s, 100’s, etc.)with the littles,  demonstrate place value and the substitution needed for arithmetic with the middles (borrowing, carrying, trading, regrouping, swapping, bundling, or whatever you choose to call it in your lessons), practice making change, or discuss money management with the olders. You can get more creative and challenge your students to grab a handful of play money and calculate the amount, then write out the amount in both digits and words. Some of you may take up the challenge to grab several random amounts and use those for addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division problems. Here’s another challenge: let your students make up their own story problems for random amounts of play money—they’ll be getting math practice and writing practice at the same time.

If you have several games that contain play money, pull it all out and pool it together: sorting by denomination is good math practice. As seen in the picture, not all games use the same denominations, so your students can learn to adapt their math practice to the supplies that are available. I even threw in a large handful of real pennies from the coin can that serves as a doorstop here—if you have a coin can or jar, you might want to borrow some of its contents for a little more math practice. (My kids paid much closer attention to math discussions if the problems involved money or food instead of just meaningless numbers!) When the math lesson is over, let the kiddies continue sorting and counting the play money: setting up a pretend “store” is great “stealth” learning! Maybe they’d like to invent a new game that uses all this play money, plus several other random pieces from a few games. Setting up the game instructions offers writing practice, determining the rules is problem-solving practice, and playing the game will give even more practice in counting, adding, subtracting, making change, and whatever other math skills their new game includes. When the time comes, sorting all those game bits and play money back into their respective games is excellent experience for the sorting required in algebra and other higher math studies, and it gets the kids involved in putting things away, instead of leaving all the clean-up to Mom.

For more tips, see also:
Building Blocks for Success in Math
Sorting Toys Is Algebra
Gee Whiz! Quiz

Filed Under: Activity Ideas, Learning Outside the Books, Math, Tactile Learning, Workshop Wednesday, Writing

Workshop Wednesday: Sidewalk Art

April 4, 2012 by 1 Comment

What better way to incorporate drawing lessons into a beautiful homeschooling day than with chalk on the sidewalk or driveway? We often took our favorite storybooks outside with a bucket of chalk (and maybe a folded towel for under the knees) and picked some simple illustrations to duplicate.

Our favorites included the Little Miss and Mister Men characters by Roger Hargreaves and all of the fanciful creations of Dr. Seuss. Actually, we discovered that you can turn nearly any smiley-faced character into a Seuss-ian delight by adding an outcropping of tall feathers to the top of its head, a long, long, long tail, and brightly colored fur in zig-zaggy stripes. Now that’s a great lesson in cartooning! Encourage your budding artists to make a game of adding more and more features to their creatures by calling out “Heads” or “Tails” and supplementing those traits. Give each character special talents or accessories, such as juggling ice cream cones, wearing a polka-dot necktie, or holding a dozen strings tied to gigantic balloons.

Be sure to take the time to admire each other’s masterpieces and praise their unique qualities. Give each artist a turn to tell about his or her drawing, pointing out details and describing techniques used, for informal practice at oral presentations. Most of all, have fun making silly drawings and enjoying the chalk antics.

Sometimes we made several individual drawings, and sometimes we connected multiple parts into a long scene that filled our front sidewalk for the full width of our property. One summer day when lots of neighbor kids were looking for something to break up the boredom, I drew a very basic chalk outline of an old-fashioned circus train that stretched out over several blocks of our sidewalk, assigning each block (one box car) to a different child. We discussed as a group what sort of things our train should have (planning and problem-solving skills), and the children chose what they wanted to draw (delegating skills). One drew a box car with two giraffes sticking their long necks out the top. Another drew a lion in a cage, and another chose to draw the train’s steam engine with great puffs of smoke billowing out the smokestack. Our train had a few clowns, bright colored flags and pennants, and the words “Circus Train” on the side of yet another box car. The kids spent most of the afternoon drawing and coloring with the chalk and adding special touches. When anyone finished his own section, he would go help someone else, giving them all a great feeling of teamwork. The finished sidewalk “mural” received lots of admiration and compliments from neighbors and was the object of several photographs by parents. The kids all put so much work into their circus train, that we were all very glad that we had no rain for several days afterwards! However, rain was usually seen to be a magical eraser that tended to bring new inspiration for more drawings instead of disappointment that the previous masterpieces were gone.

Obviously, a variety of chalk colors makes drawing more delightful, but don’t underestimate the value of plain white chalk. Your art students will discover shading on their own, as they go over and over a section to make the color more intense, and having a limited palette of colors will make them more creative with using patterns. Be careful to use chalk marked “sidewalk chalk,” as others may not wash off as easily. I once bought a box of beautiful colored chalk at a garage sale, only to discover that the intense colors left permanent stains on the clothing we were wearing when we used it! The knees and elbows and sleeve cuffs had deep colors ground in from kneeling and leaning on the drawings, no matter how careful we had been. One more point: chalk is soft and gets used up quickly on rough surfaces, so buy in bulk! No one wants to stop in the middle of drawing an enormous stegosaurus, just because he ran out of chalk.

Whether your creations are large or small, simple or elaborate, you can enjoy a nice day outside with chalk, learning to copy drawings from books or making your own creations. Starting with simple line drawings from a favorite storybook will help beginning artists gain confidence, since they don’t have to rely on their imaginations for inspiration. After all, a large blank sidewalk can be rather intimidating! Making your drawings LARGE increases the number of details that can be added: a small face may not have room for much more than eyes and a smile, but a big face can also hold eyelashes, freckles, glasses, or a handlebar mustache!

Filed Under: Activity Ideas, Homeschool How-To's, Kinesthetic Learning, Learning Outside the Books, Tactile Learning, Visual Learning, Workshop Wednesday

Workshop Wednesday: Take It Outside!

March 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Homeschooling does not have to mean exclusively house-schooling. When the weather is favorable, taking a lesson outdoors can revitalize learning, whether you take a nature walk around the neighborhood, sit on a blanket for read-aloud time, or do worksheets at the patio table.

When my kids were old enough and responsible enough to complete an assignment on their own, I rewarded them with the privilege of taking a lesson away from the school table and doing it elsewhere. Sometimes they took work to their bedrooms, but one location my daughter loved was her “reading ledge.” She had asked Dad to use a couple of extra boards to build a shelf in the corner of the fence in our backyard. It’s just the right size for a child to sit and read a while, nestled into the corner, listening to the birds and squirrels and the occasional car pulling up in the neighbor’s driveway. Notice that my husband also added a slim “step” board, about halfway between the ledge and the ground, for just the right amount of a boost to climb up onto the ledge.

For a few years, we had a tree-house in another part of the yard—more of a platform up in a tree, but there were a few boards attached to the trunk for steps, and it was high enough to give a lofty view of the neighboring yards. The kids would climb up there with a book to read or a math lesson to work on, and they were transported from just another homeschool day to the Swiss Family Robinson’s island.

Even a child who is not thrilled about reading can suddenly find it an enjoyable activity when it takes place in a unique environment: inside a tent, under a shady tree, in a make-shift clubhouse in the attic of the garage, or anywhere else out of the ordinary “school” locale. Whether reading for pleasure or reading an assigned passage in a textbook, whether writing a short essay or writing out math problems, taking the lesson outdoors can free the mind to think deeper thoughts and understand greater concepts just because the realm of ideas is not limited within four walls and a solid ceiling. The sounds of birds, leaves, wind, and other ambient noises can actually stimulate more thoughts than a quiet room. Yes, sometimes those thoughts may be slightly “off topic,” but that freedom is why we chose homeschooling in the first place. And there is always the bonus of new lesson ideas that come from time spent in nature: studying the busy-ness of an anthill, learning the names of all those parts of flowers, discovering that bees won’t notice anyone watching them while they work at collecting pollen from every blossom on an apple tree, focusing the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass to burn your initials into a piece of scrap wood, and seeing who can bite into the first stalk of spring rhubarb without puckering.

Ready for some learning style applications? A kinesthetic student may be more prone to reading when his surroundings require him to balance or brace himself against the tree limbs or fence corner or while swaying a swing. A tactile child may enjoy the feel of the grass on his fingers and toes, the leaves brushing against his face or between his fingers, or feeling the smooth rocks he chose to use as a bookmark or paperweight while reading his book in the breeze.  The visual learner may appreciate reading his biology textbook in the tree-house because he can look around the neighborhood from his lofty perch and see if he can glimpse an elm, an eagle, or imagine he can see the photosynthesis of the sun on leaves as it happens.  An auditory child may find that the songs of the birds help him to concentrate on his math problems because his ears aren’t busy wondering what his siblings are up to at the moment, or that the music from the radio of the neighbor working on his car will help to remind him of the correct formula when he needs to recall it later.

Homeschooling does not have to mean exclusively house-schooling, and life does not take place between the pages of a workbook. When the weather cooperates, take your homeschooling outside and meet life face to face.

Filed Under: Activity Ideas, Encouraging Your Student, Kinesthetic Learning, Reading, Workshop Wednesday

Workshop Wednesday: ABC Flashcards

March 21, 2012 by 2 Comments

Anyone want to upcycle some of that ubiquitous cardboard packaging that passes through our homes and turn it into teaching/learning tools? You’re on! Let’s make some flashcards!!

DIY flashcards from upcycled cereal boxes

This week’s photo actually shows three related sets of alphabet flashcards that measure 3” square. Call these approximate measurements, because no one needs to waste precious time obsessing over the precision and exactness of something we’re making for free. I collected cereal boxes, brownie mix boxes, popsicle boxes, tissue boxes, pudding cup boxes, and pretty much every flavor of thin cardboard box that was large enough to cut up into something else. Confession: I made these with a paper cutter, but only because I saved up and treated myself to one. During most of our homeschooling years, I used a ruler and scissors for projects like this, and the results were just as good.

Open the boxes flat and start measuring and cutting. Again, don’t let perfectionism sidetrack you with thoughts of non-90-degree corners or less-than-perfect sides. Your students can learn from playing with these cards even after they are rescued from an eager-to-play-fetch-with-anything puppy. When you have a decent supply of cards cut from the cardboard, grab your Sharpie marker and write on the blank sides. Here we have one set with upper case letters (upper left), a set with lower case letters (lower center), and a set with both upper and lower case letters in pairs (upper right). I have also made sets with numbers 1-100, states and capitals, and many other topics that I hope to address in future Workshop Wednesday posts. (Anticipation!)

Bonus Tips:

  • I favor teaching letter recognition with upper case letters first, since reversals are less likely; then introducing the lower case letters as the “little brothers” of the capitals. Kids get it, even when the big brothers and little brothers don’t look exactly alike. Learning to group the larger and smaller letters as pairs is another method for avoiding reversals.
  • Making multiple sets of letters will allow your students to spell out vocabulary words, play word games, or leave traces of their newly-acquired knowledge all around the house as they spell out the names of every lamp, vase, and throw pillow.
  • If your students have mastered letter recognition, you can make 3×5” word cards and practice turning sounded-out words into sentences.

Learning Style Activities

Visual learners will appreciate flashcards with color, so you can either use colored markers for the main information or let your visual student draw designs on the edges and corners of the cards with colored pencils or fine-point markers to jazz up the natural gray or brown of the cardboard.

Auditory learners will love to read each letter aloud, no matter what activities or games you play with the cards. Switch things up by asking them to say the sound of the letter instead of (or in addition to) its name.

Tactile learners have already grabbed your new supply of flashcards and are spreading them out on the floor or table, rearranging the letters into words. That’s how you can confirm that you have a tactile student: their hands and fingers are into everything, learning as much as they possibly can about texture, heft, and balance. Please don’t scold them for grabbing and touching—it’s how they learn best. A tactile learner who is forced to keep his hands in his lap is like a visual learner wearing a blindfold. Seriously.

Kinesthetic learners will adore playing games with these cards, especially if you spread things out. Drop the stack of upper case letters on the floor in the living room. Drop the stack of lower case letters on the kitchen table. Now shuffle the “pairs” cards and place that stack in a neutral location somewhere between the other two piles of cards. Ask your student to look at the top card and run to find the matching letter cards from each of the other locations and bring them back. (Beginning students may need to take the pairs card with them for reference.) Grouping all three cards together will prove he brought the correct ones. Your energetic student can repeat this activity until he is worn out enough to sit down for reading time or some other lesson that requires seatwork.

Combine all learning styles into challenging activities that will help your students learn from all situations and all styles of teaching. Let your imagination run free with ideas and adaptations for your own students, living quarters, and academic needs. If the weather is agreeable, take the cards outside and combine relay races with spelling or vocabulary words. Mud puddles can’t destroy your prized set of flashcards, since replacements are easily made from the next empty box. You may soon find yourself rescuing cardboard boxes from the recycling bin and calling them your “homeschool supplies” as you think of more and more uses for homemade flashcards!

Filed Under: Activity Ideas, Auditory Learning, Kinesthetic Learning, Learning Outside the Books, Learning Styles, Phonics, Preschoolers, Spelling, Tactile Learning, Visual Learning, Workshop Wednesday

Workshop Wednesday: Dot-to-Dot Skip-Counting

March 14, 2012 by 1 Comment

I bought a dot-to-dot coloring book, which was much harder to find than I had anticipated (this one is from School Zone Publishing). Their pictures only used numbers from 1-25, so I dug out some small white stickers, grabbed my scissors and a black fine-point Sharpie, and went to work. I cut the stickers into pieces small enough to cover the numbers on the picture and re-numbered the drawing using skip-counting. Sometimes the pictures are complicated enough that it’s important to only do one number at a time (cover previous number with a sticker, write new number on the sticker, then move on to next number), just so you don’t lose your place and mess up the whole thing. With more complex drawings, my stickers sometimes overlapped the lines of the picture, so I just re-connected those lines, drawing right across the sticker.

Click on photo for larger image.

I changed the directions at the bottom of the page to correspond to the new, improved numbering system: Count by 2’s; Count by 3’s; Count by 10’s; Count by 12’s; and so on. I made the skip-counting harder as the difficulty of the pictures progressed. To make things even more challenging, I changed some of the directions to say “Start at 3. Guess the rule?” so that the pictures didn’t always begin at 1 and the student would have to analyze the numbers to determine which one came next. I made some pictures start at 2, 3, 4, 5, 50, 55, 101, etc. and vary in increments. Some pages counted by 2’s on even numbers; some counted by 2’s on odd numbers. Some counted by 5’s, 10’s, or 100’s—a wide variety of skip-counting experiences.

Skip-counting is good practice for multiplication, and following the numbers of a dot-to-dot puzzle helps your students learn what interval comes next by connecting them in numerical order. The complexity of the numbering system quickly overtakes the simplicity of the picture, providing a worthy challenge to math students who might feel silly doing the simple dot-to-dot coloring page in its original version. Following the random order of the numbers on the page provides more interest and more challenge than if the student had just written out a skip-counting series, and the student can easily self-check his work by judging whether or not the picture has been completed correctly.

BONUS TIP: After you’ve gone to all the trouble of changing the numbers, wouldn’t it be nice to have this last longer than once-through-and-done by your little smarty-pants student? Cut the pages out of the book, slip a page into a plastic page protector, and let your child use a dry-erase marker on the plastic. Wet-erase markers (also called “transparency markers”) will work great, too, and they don’t rub off instantly whenever a stray sleeve crosses the page. A quick wipe with a wet tissue will clean up wet-erase markers and prepare the page for the next use. You could even use enough plastic page sleeves to hold all the pages from the entire coloring book and put them all into a 3-ring binder. Give your child the binder, some markers in assorted colors, and a couple of tissues, and you won’t hear from him for a very long time!

Filed Under: Activity Ideas, Learning Outside the Books, Math, Roadblocks to Learning, Tactile Learning, Visual Learning, Workshop Wednesday

Workshop Wednesday: Placemat + Magnets = Educational FUN!

March 7, 2012 by 5 Comments

Find a placemat with educational information you’d like your students to learn: states & capitals, U.S. Presidents, whatever you can find. I’ve used both the laminated plastic placemats and the thicker, foam placemats. The former placemat in this photo was a laminated periodic table of elements, proving that educational manipulatives DO work for kids older than five. Notice the element in the lower right corner that is flipped over to show the magnet on its back. The placemat cost me about $3, which is an amazing price for educational gadgetry of this quality!

Periodic Table of Elements

Cut the placemat apart into its various components; scissors will usually work, but you may want to use a razor-knife or X-Acto blade for accurate cuts on thicker materials. Don’t worry about leftover pieces—you can throw them away. The thicker, foam placemat pieces are good for more projects that we’ll cover in a later post (think of them as craft foam that is not subject to static electricity), so you might choose to hang onto those for a while.

Now is a good time to rid your refrigerator door of all those freebie magnets you’ve collected from the pizza guy, hairdresser, auto mechanic, insurance agent, and every politician who marched in last summer’s parades. I always accept freebie magnets when offered (regardless of political affiliations)—they are my favorite homeschool supply! Using your scissors again, cut the magnets into pieces about ½” square or whatever size will fit easily onto the back of the placemat pieces you cut in the last step.

The next step may require a trip to the scrapbooking department of whatever store is near you, unless you are already an avid scrapbooker…er, bookscrapper…uh, person who documents life events in keepsake albums with pretty papers, ribbons, and all variety of cutesy add-ons. I’m not one of them, but I do recognize the homeschooling value of all those fabulous supplies! What you need right now is a box of the adhesive squares that are used for mounting photos or other items onto scrapbook pages. Stick one of those double-stick-tape squares onto the printed side of the little magnets you just cut up, then stick the other side of the tape to the back of your placemat piece. Don’t go all perfectionist in trying to line things up, just smack it on there and move on to the next one—you’ve got a lot of these to make. When each placemat piece has a magnet on its back, stick them all to a steel cookie sheet, pizza pan, or other flat metal item that will hold magnets and is more portable than the refrigerator door.

BONUS TIP: Let your kids help you with any of these steps and they won’t be able to wait until it’s all done to play with it. Now turn them loose and pretend you really don’t care if they learn what’s printed on this new magnetic educational gadget. Your kids will think they are just playing, but you’ll know they will learn from it, even if they think they are building houses or roads or flowers with the magnetic pieces. [wink]

Filed Under: Activity Ideas, Learning Outside the Books, Learning Styles, Roadblocks to Learning, Tactile Learning, Workshop Wednesday
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