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Friday Freebie – Math Center Labels
Happy Friday! Don’t you love four-day weeks?! Earlier this week I shared a new freebie for the math center, and today I have another one. These Math Manipulative Labels will make your life easier and save you tons of time. Download them and start organizing because nothing is more fun than labeling stuff (I’m not joking). Have a great weekend!
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New Stuff!
I just finished putting together two new resources for the classroom and I LOVE them! I’ve been working on these for a while and I am so excited to share them with you because they are going to add value to your classroom centers! One thing that I’ve always struggled with are the wanderers – those children who have a really hard time choosing an activity, so they just kind of wander around. I also have a hard time helping children who don’t understand how to play all by themselves, you know, the kids who need to be told what to do and when to do it. I designed these…
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Slow Down Fall!
Fall is here! It might still be 90 degrees outside, but if you’ve taken a minute to read a blog, browse pinterest, or visit a store over the weekend, you’ve definitely seen the signs; Halloween decorations, apple recipes, and sweater outfits are out in full force. This time of year can be especially confusing for little ones – there are simply too many transitions. Back to school, different clothes, new routines, new teachers, then you throw in shorter days, busy weekends, festivals, and holidays. That’s a lot for a little one to deal with! Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE fall (seriously, you should see my personal collection of pumpkin…
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Friday Freebie – Printable Paint Chips
Happy Friday! I went way back today to pull out a freebie that I haven’t featured in a very long time. This Printable Paint Chips set includes 33 different paint chips that you can print right from your computer – yes, I know that it’s probably more cost effective to go pick up the free paint chips from the store than it is to print your own BUT every time that I needed paint chips I didn’t have time to run to the store – I needed them now! So I made some that I could print in a pinch. The possibilities are endless with these, you could match color…
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Teaching Children to Use Loose Parts
When you incorporate loose parts into your classroom for the first time, there is bound to be a learning curve. You’ll have to teach the children appropriate ways to use the Marian’s, and model how to be creative with them. Many of your children may not be familiar with open-ended materials like these and they may not choose to use them simply because they aren’t sure how. Here are some tips for teaching children to use these types of materials; Incorporate them slowly – start with one or two different types of loose parts that you use for planned activities, then leave these in the classroom for children to explore.…
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Storing and Organizing Loose Parts
Organizing all of those loose parts is important because they are usually smaller objects. If you don’t keep on top of that organization you can easily have a great big mess of loose parts. Here are some of the strategies that I’ve used to keep my loose parts organized; Bins with drawers – these are perfect because you can choose the size of drawer that works best for the items you need to store Tubs with lids – when I buy tubs with lids I’m very intentional to purchase the ones that my materials will fit in best. Storage space is a hot commodity and I hate to waste it…
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Where to find loose parts
As preschool teachers, it’s in our nature to hold onto things. We just can’t help it, we might be able to use that for something! I know how deep this runs, I’ve been out of the classroom for almost two years now and I still have a collection of empty containers in one of the cabinets in my office – they might come in handy one day! Collecting loose parts plays to this piece of our “hold onto that” mentality. The most difficult thing about loose parts is that you often need a fair amount of whatever item you want to use. You need enough that the children can actually…
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Loose Parts Inspiration
I am a huge fan of loose parts for a couple of reasons; They encourage creativity – if you give five children a basket of pebbles, a bucket of twigs, and a collection of old keys they will all find different ways to use the items. They are easy to gather – loose parts are usually natural or recycled. They won’t cost you a lot of money and often the children can be involved in collecting them, which motivates them to explore these items after they’ve been gathered. They fit into so many different centers – use your loose parts as counters in your math center, materials for exploring weight/volume/mass…
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Friday Freebie – Open House Signs
Happy Friday! I’m all about natural decor for the classroom, I’ve shared this preference often! There’s one popular material that has made it’s way into my room in more ways that I ever could’ve imagined is burlap. It’s versatile, it’s pretty cheap (especially if you can find it at the home improvement store), and it holds up really well to children who are not always gentle. If you love burlap, and general rustic loveliness, this freebie is for you! These beautiful Open House Signs are from Allyson Sutton. It looks like she’s given you everything you need to organize your welcome back night. Even if you’ve already started school, make…
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Color Palettes
I’ve written a lot about classroom design this week, so I wanted to share one of my favorite sites for inspiration, have you checked out Design Seeds?! Don’t click on that link unless you’ve got time to waste, because I guarantee that it will suck you in! The site is a collection of color schemes inspired by photographs. They are fascinating and I could spend hours exploring the different combinations. My favorite thing about the site is that it will let you choose a color, and then give you all of the different palettes that include that color. This makes it really easy to find color schemes that go with…
