Activities

Make a class book to help children understand past and present. Each day, take several pictures of the children doing activities. At the end of the day, have children look at pictures and choose one to represent their day.

You will need cereal boxes or other small food boxes and markers. Show the children a real remote and talk about all the things we use remote controls for in our daily lives. Talk to children about turning things on and off.

Use a remote control or make a large, pretend remote out of a shoe box. While playing music, have the children dance when you "turn the remote on" and stop when you "turn it off.

During outdoor time, encourage the children to play a familiar game using book characters instead of the regular names.

Read books to the infant with lots of simple words and repetition such as Moo, Baa La La La by Sandra Boynton.

Brainstorm gestures that the children can use when conflict arises among peers. Some gestures may include holding a hand out to indicate “stop” or shaking the head for “no.

Encourage the children to lie on their cots before rest time and "read" a book. This creates good habits as well as gives the children some wind- down time before naptime.

Collect menus and other restaurant-style props to create a restaurant in the dramatic play area. Be sure to include aprons, notepads for taking orders and serving trays.

Provide props in the dramatic play area to recreate a favorite restaurant. Along with menus and food items, include order pad with pictures of the available food items.

Create a “restaurant” prop box with menus, plates, ads, logos, food, a cash register and utensils. Encourage the children to create their own restaurant scene.

Tune: "Mary Had a Little Lamb"
Girls are in the restroom now,

restroom now,

restroom now

Girls are in the restroom now

Boys, please don't come in
Boys are in the rest room now…

Post charts into the reading center of previously taught finger plays, songs, and poems, along with props, for the children to retell and act out.

Create simple prop boxes that the children can use in the reading center for retelling familiar stories.

Using familiar nursery rhymes or poems as a starting point, encourage the children to tell the story of the nursery rhyme in their own words. For example, think about poor Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater's wife being locked up in a pumpkin shell.

In advance, gather items from the different centers, such as a block, doll or counting bear, and put them in a box. Tell the children that someone has mixed up the items and they need to be returned to their proper places.

Provide infants with safe, clean recycled materials to explore, such as empty cereal boxes, oatmeal tubs and beverage containers with secured lids. Use language related to what the child is doing with the specific object.

During the daily closing circle, provide an opportunity for the children to share something new they learned that day, a moment that made them laugh or something they want to do better tomorrow.

Place chairs in a circle and put a deck of picture cards beneath just one chair. Have each child stand in front of a chair. Sing, “Rhyme around the rosie, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all sit down.

During outdoor time, have the children collect objects from around the playground. Ask them to say the name of the object and a word that rhymes. Nonsense words work great; “Here is a some mulch, it rhymes with tulch.” Provide assistance as needed.

Read the rhyming book Sheep in a Jeep by Nancy Shaw. Encourage the children to rhyme with you as you read.