An Invitation to draw

Most children LOVE to draw but i do find Tara will 9/10 draw a bird or a house and Mason will draw a face or a digger but how do i encourage variety?

I left an invitation to draw on the table on morning and they jumped at completing them!

I flicked through magazines to find some interesting pictures, then cut them out leaving out half of the picture. Tara had half a butterfly and Mason had half a duck.

They then had to use their imagination to complete the picture and surrounding environment. These would be great to keep up your sleeve for long car rides, plane trips or when you just need that five minutes to make a phone call!

Apple colours

I had printed off these apples to continue his apple theme week and i used my own colours to colour them as previously with Tara i had colour printed card and found the shades were very hard to distinguish. The reds closer to orange and the browns closer to grey.

After colouring them i cut and laminated as well.

These made great small cards that i placed out in Montessori methods (left to right top to bottom) and then asked Mason to hand me the...blue apple,red apple etc.

Leaving the ones i knew he would struggle with to the end and spoke about what else in the house was grey or white etc.

 I will continue this every few days and look forward to seeing him take pride in naming them all :)

Graphing letter of the week

Trying to keep with the letter of the week while big sissy is at home on holidays i found her some apple theme grid work over at making learning fun...

http://www.makinglearningfun.com/themepages/AppleGridWork.htm

We had never done these before but she loved it! Basically there are grid coordinates that she must follow and colour in a designated colour then the more coordinates you find the picture becomes more apparent. The activity kept her guessing right up to the last square of what it could possibly be that she was graphing...then she saw it...An apple!

Water shades

I made up these small containers of blue and green colour shades with water and food colouring by increasing the food colour drops in each container.

I mixed them up and showed Tara how i placed the lightest shade on my left then progressed to the darkest at the end of the line then asked her to repeat it.

When showing any task to a child ensure that you are placing the items left to right which has been proven to aid in reading skills.

Colour shade pegging

This activity i found on an inspiring website
http://totschool.shannons.org/

I found our colour shade samples at "bristol" paint store. Just use two cards of each colour sample with one being your colour chart which i backed with a harder cardboard to keep it stiff while the peg was going on and the other sample card is cut up into strips and glued onto a peg.
Tara matches the shades together while practising the important skill of squeezing pegs open.

Then self checks her work by turning the card over and seeing if her stickers match. Great activity to not only use fine motor skills that are so important for school readiness but opens a language opportunity for colours with light and darkest.