Category: School Activities

Creating shakers with your children can be fun. Below you can find three links to get some ideas on how to make shakers.

These are four ways of how to make good use of your shakers.

Move and shake

 

Aim: Imitating actions and learning new vocabulary.

 

Here are some actions to do with the shakers. It is very important to say the phrase while doing the action.  Encourage your child to do the same.

 

• Shake your shakers in the air
• Shake it high and shake it low
• Shake it yes, shake it no
• Shake it up and shake it down
• Shake it near and shake it far
• Shake it fast and shake it slow

Shake to the music

 

Aim: Developing rhythm and rhyme. Rhythm and rhyme are important phonological awareness skills. These skills prepare children for reading and writing.

 

• Put on some music and have fun shaking the different shakers along with your child as you dance.
• Ask your child to listen to the different sounds in the music and choose the sound s/he likes best.
• Try to get your child shaking along with the beat. (The beat is the sound that is like a heartbeat. It can be fast or slow).
• Now get them to try shaking along with the rhythm. (The rhythm is a pattern that usually repeats, consisting of short and long sounds)

Listening match

 

Aim: Developing the skill of discriminating between sounds. This is another important phonological awareness skill which will help children learn how to recognize different sounds.  This will help them to develop the skill to discriminate between the different sounds in words. This is an important pre-reading and pre-writing skill.

 

For this activity we are going to use plastic egg shakers filled with seeds/popcorn/lentils or rice.

1. Fill in plastic eggs with popcorn seeds, lentils, rice etc.
2. Mix up the eggs and encourage your child to pick up an egg and shake it.
3. S/he must shake all the eggs and listen attentively to the sounds they make.
4. Using his/her listening skills, your child must remember the sounds each egg made and try to match the 2 eggs which made the same sound. (That is the eggs that are filled with the same seed).

(Prompting him/her to keep shaking the eggs until s/he finds the one that matches will help).

Encourage the child by asking questions like; ‘Do you think that they make the same sound?’

Rhythm copy shake

 

Aim: Developing auditory memory skills. Auditory memory is a very important phonological awareness skill. It will help them remember information given to them orally, follow instructions, recognise sounds and match them to letters and understand what they have read.

Take a shaker and shake it to the rhythm of a familiar song.  Give another shaker to your child and ask him/her child to copy the rhythm you made with the shaker. Challenge your child to shake a rhythm s/he chooses and you have to copy it.

 

 

Links:

How to make an egg shaker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntwc-hBHKoA

How to make a paper plate shaker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usu97dYr76k

How to make a paper cup shaker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQKtp7UbBcQ

 

Hope you like these ideas and enjoy these games!

Ms. Pauline

Kinder 1.3

 

Numeracy pattern activities with blocks

While these two numeracy activities are aimed for Kindergarten children, your child might find the second activity more challenging than the first one.

 

Activity 1 – Follow the pattern

This activity involves following a coloured pattern using blocks.  It is aimed at helping children develop eye/hand co-ordination and reinforce colour coding and colour recognition. The children will also learn how to follow patterns.

For this activity you need:

• coloured markers
• coloured blocks
• an A4 paper

 

With the coloured markers, draw the outline, of the blocks, on a white A4 paper.

Make 3 rows (as seen in the picture).

Ask your child to take the blocks and follow the patterns on the paper.

Activity 2 – Ordering and sequencing numbers

This activity is aimed at developing number recognition and number sequence.

For this activity we need:

• a whiteboard marker
• blocks

Number the blocks with a whiteboard marker from 1 till 10 . Encourage your child to stack the blocks starting from 1 till 10.

You can make the activity more challenging by gradually adding more blocks with numbers greater than 10 (e.g. from 1 to 20).

Enjoy

Ms. Anna K1.2

Rhyme

Why is rhyme important?

Rhyme teaches children how language works. It helps them notice and work with the sounds within words. When children are familiar with a nursery rhyme or rhyming words in a book, they learn to predict the rhyming word. This prepares them to identify and generate rhymes, which is an important pre- reading skill.

This video shows you how to teach rhyme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9qNKjv_hW8

Easter egg rhyming puzzles

This is a very good activity to practice rhyme. Double click on the link below to open the printable pdf file for the activity.

Rhymes Acrobat Document

After printing and cutting the egg halves, lay them on a table. Encourage your child to take a piece, say the name of the picture on it and try to find the rhyming word from the other egg halves on the table. If they find it difficult, they can start by matching the egg halves according to the colour and shape.  The more they practice the more they will grasp the concept of rhyme.

Find your rhyming words:

While reading books (both in English and in Maltese) try to find words that rhyme. Draw the pictures of these rhyming words on the recording page (the page with the template of the egg halves on it).  You can also use these templates to draw any other rhyming words you think of.

Variation:

To make the activity more challenging and help your child develop his/her visual discrimination and visual memory skills, lay the puzzle pieces face down.

Your child will use visual cues to pick out two egg halves that s/he thinks could fit together. Then turn over the two egg halves s/he chooses.  If they have rhyming words, that’s a match.  If not, they turn them over and start again.

Ms Marita K 2.3