Activities

Read Soft and Smooth, Rough and Bumpy by Dana Meachen Rau. Gather materials with different textures such as cotton balls, plastic spoons, velvet, feathers, coins and sandpaper.

Put a pedometer on different children each day so everyone has a turn. Graph the distance or steps each child walks in the day. At the end of the week, graph the various distances and make comparisons.

Put a pedometer on different children each day so everyone has a turn. Graph the distance or steps each child walks in the day during outdoor time and inside. At the end of the week, graph the various distances and make comparisons.

Give the children a poster board, a paper towel tube, a yardstick and small cars in the block center. Encourage the children to hold the tube at an angle and roll the cars through the tube onto the poster board to see how far they go.

Play a game in large group where each child says his/her name in a funny voice, describing how he/ she feels about the day. Examples include excited, happy, tired, sad or silly. Have them think of other descriptive words.

Create several mats with a picture of a tree, using a die-cut machine or clip art. Provide each child with a number of red pom-poms. Say, “There are five apples in the tree. Use your pom-poms and count out five apples and put them in your tree.

This is a partner game that uses children's knowledge of number combinations. Write a target number on a card and place it on a tray.

Give the children a balance scale and a recording sheet with pictures of items, such as three crayons, a glue stick, scissors or five markers.

Write all of the children's names on index cards and place them in a basket. Sit in a large group circle and pass the basket from one child to the next when the music begins.

Read Dr. Seuss's Foot Book. Emphasize the words relating to amount: "Feet, feet, feet. How many, many feet you meet." Use different words to comment on the feet.

Choose two or three children to come and stand in front.

Ask for french fry containers from a local restaurant. Make “french fries” by cutting yellow kitchen sponges into strips. Give each child a container and four french fries.

Fill the sensory center table with sand, small gravel or other pourable materials. Provide small scoops and cups and larger containers such as milk jugs and soda bottles.

Encourage the use of non-standard measuring by investigating how many steps it takes to go from one structure to another on the playground.

During small group, provide children with counters and verbally give them a sentence.  Have the children repeat the sentence, then repeat it slowly, breaking apart each word in the sentence.

Provide the children with a simple sentence of three to four words written on a sentence strip. Encourage the children to segment the sentence by cutting the words apart.

Ask children an open-ended question about an attribute of an animal or object and encourage them to provide as many responses as possible.

When the children come to the carpet for large group, count the number of girls and say, “There are ___ girls here today.” Then count the number of boys and say, “There are ___ boys here today.

At mealtime, encourage the children to count out servings of food as they place the food on their own plates. Say, “Rosie, you're getting more carrot sticks. Let's count them together. One, two, three carrot sticks.

Have a tub of sand at the small group table along with containers and scoops for each child. Fill one container as the children watch. Count the scoops as you fill the container.