Activities

Provide the infant with wooden or plastic salad spoons to explore and bang. Demonstrate how the spoons can be used. For example, use the spoon to hit blocks or empty containers for the infants to hear the sounds.

Play musical selections from Tchaikovsky's “The Nutcracker Suite” or Vivaldi's “The Four Seasons.” Provide the children with feather boas, wands, scarves or ribbons. Play music and have them dance like woodland fairies, sparrows or other creatures.

Provide the children pages from a magazine or newspaper and highlighters. Show them a familiar word from a repetitive book, such as “walking” from Sue Williams's I Went Walking.

Make cards, some with words and some with letters. Spread out the cards in a defined area during outdoor time. Ask the children to indentify which cards have words and which cards only have letters.

Begin large group by introducing a word of the day, such as investigate or opposite. Use the word in context to see if the children can figure out what the word means.

Pick a word of the week. It may be related to your current unit of study or it can be a vocabulary word from a story you are reading. Introduce the word to the children early in the week. Use this word to get their attention during the day.

Give the children a big book with large pictures and simple words, such as A Monster Sandwich by Joy Cowley. Give the children a fun pointer, such as a spatula, to point to the text as you read, "Put some lettuce on it.

Provide the children with the opportunity to point out individual words in a big book, using a pointer. This could be done in large group.

During outdoor time, take a few big books outside. Tell the children that you will point to different parts of the books, and when you point they should do particular actions.

Use a web-based word cloud program or an application to create a wordle for your group. Have the children brainstorm words that describe their characteristics, favorite classroom activities or things they do well.

During large group, have three children stand side by side in front of the room with the teacher. The teacher will say a phrase that has three words. When the first word is spoken the first child will jump, and so on for the next two words.

Have the children sit on the rug in a circle. Read a sentence from a familiar book. Read it again and when the first word is read, have the first child jump. Go around the circle and have each child jump when a word is read.

Let the children create collages using magazines. Cut out pictures of people doing various jobs and glue them onto construction paper. Challenge the children to identify some of the jobs they cut out and label these on their collage.

Read Talk and Work it Out by Cheryl Meiners. This book teaches children how to learn to calm themselves: state the problem, listen, think of solutions, try one, evaluate results and even agree to disagree when a solution isn't possible.

Read Cool Down and Work Through Anger by Cheri J. Meiners. Tell the children that everyone gets angry. Teach them it's okay to feel angry, but not okay to hurt anyone with actions or words.

This is fun to do outside. You will need a large box with low sides or a small plastic baby pool. Line the bottom with butcher paper. Have the children squirt different colors of paint onto the paper. Place one or two small balls in the box.

Have a three-legged race or a wheelbarrow race in a grassy area during outdoor time.

During outdoor time have a three-legged race or a wheelbarrow race in a grassy area.

Place a variety of books about solving problems in the reading center area for the children to choose.

Take a drum outside and have the children dance to a variety of drumbeats during outdoor time.