Learning ideas, games, activities, books, and suggestions for the kindergarten through fourth grade learner, ideal for home learner or school student.
Teachers and homeschool parents: Imagine taking your task cards with you on a tablet or computer. Your student(s) work independently, getting instant feedback on their work, whether correct or incorrect. They even take their spelling test right there in the app! When you get a chance, you check their progress on their digital task cards. At
Before a young reader can parse together phonemes to form a word, they have hear the parts of the words. Hearing the parts of compound words and blending words together is then an essential pre-reading skill to develop. The hands-on compound words activities we put together were fun for my school-resistant preschooler. My five-year-old daughter rarely
Before a child is ready to jump into learning to read, it’s important to review basic phonemic principles, such as hearing the parts of words. Rhyming is a fun activity that is ideal for kids preparing to read or just starting out. After reading a favorite picture book, we played a “Dusty” Rhyming Game to practice making
Even before my daughter could put the sounds of words together, she loved playing with words! As the months have passed, she’s become more confident in reading CVC words and these CVC activities are favorites we return to time and again.
The Caldecott Award-winning book The House in the Night is illustrated with scratch art as it tells a story with the feel of “This is the House That Jack Built.” As we poured over the textured images, we were impressed with the ways that lines created texture to look like birds’ wings or tree leaves. After
Multiplication is something that comes up again and again and again. My memories of elementary school math revolve around the horrid timed practice tests we had to take each and every week in third grade. So that’s why, for my kids’ sake, I want to make sure that use hands-on multiplication review activities and games
We’ve learned how to find the volume of a cubical object (such as my son’s bedroom). But how does one find the volume of something as odd-shaped as a rock? Using Archimedes’ story as an example, we made our own kitchen Archimedes water displacement science experiment to understand the concepts and reach our own “Eureka”
There are so many STEM learning opportunities at my public library. Obviously, every area has it’s own budget. In areas like mine where we pay a lot of property taxes, our library has a lot of amazing resources beyond books. At your own local library, ask your librarians what they might offer. Check your public
My four-year-old daughter is not yet reading. But the other day she was delighted to see the “Go Cubs Go” marquee in front of the doctor’s office. To her surprise (and mine!) she told me what it said! I have a one-track mind this week: Cubs baseball! We’ve also enjoyed counting the “W” banners as
In our STEM Challenge class a few weeks ago, we had the challenge to make a paper airplane that could fly out of the school room door. We had a lot of fun testing and tweaking our paper airplanes to get them to fly! Learning about paper airplanes has prompted my son to discover the
We had so much fun playing with apples in STEAM class yesterday. We learned about the scientific method and then we created towers (or modern art) with apple chunks. Our apple STEAM projects were a lot of fun.
This week’s STE(A)M project was building a bridge for an elephant (a little toy elephant). The kids had a blast working with cardstock and index cards. They were surprised at what they could do! We also learned some engineering vocabulary to go along with our project. We used the 21 Elephants as our story frame
