Winterland!

Here are a few winter activities we have been doing in our classroom. None of them are very original but the children absolutely loved them.

This is a new Maths activity on our shelf. I found it on Kidssoup (they offer great preschool resources and I do recommend them highly). SO what do you do with it? The child picks a card, counts the snowflakes and places the wooden peg on the corresponding number. There is no control of error. This is the only thing I don't really like (and as a Montessori teacher, control of error is very important to encourage self-esteem and independence). So, I basically show each child how to play this game. I then tell him/her to do it on his/her own but I ask for them to call me when they are finished for me to check their work. Two of them had a go at it and believe me, they didn't forget to call me back... they were so proud of their work!!

I have replaced a few tools on our play dough tray and added a few items. I showed the children how they could make snowmen by flattening the dough with the roller and by cutting circles with the different sized objects I provided them with. They then added buttons, scraf scarf etc... God, they are now fighting for this activity!! I love it because it overlaps several fields in our curriculum: fine motor sills development, language,  art and crafts and even maths as I ask them to count all the buttons they are using on their snowmen!

Using some styrofoam nuggets used for packing, we made some igloos with the children. We have started talking about Antartica  (I will write another post about this) and the children were very excited about making their own igloo!!

And finally, as we are practising recognising/reading/writing our names, we wrote our names using paper cirlces and piling them up on top of one another to make snowmen. Some of the children are a step ahead of others and can now write their name all on their own. But they still enjoyed this exercise. This reinforces letter recognition and is a fun pre-writing or pre-reading activity. Try it!