COVID Creativity: Mini-Boxes for the Win!

Whether you’re in the classroom or remote, one of your biggest challenges is what to do when you have early finishers or mini-breaks. With the health and safety rules in place due to COVID, it's not advised to share resources between students, so it's time to get creative. 

If you are in school, make up mini-boxes of interesting, curriculum-related or fine motor building materials. Have students choose one each week to be their in-school “busy box” or go-to downtime activity. At the end of the week, students will place the mini-boxes on a table and "quarantine" them.

If you are remote or have remote students, give choices and picture models for them to make up one of their own each week to keep handy at home :) Encourage use of everyday items, such as buttons, spoons, or natural or recycled materials. This is a no-cost to low-cost solution. 

"Design" your boxes to go with science exploratory units, math lessons, or word-building and letter practice. Using materials already on-hand should keep you from spending more time out of your already-stressed schedule and once they are established, they'll be in a rotation and just require occasional tweaking :)

Some examples might be: 

1 - Grab a handful of letter tiles (Scrabble?), paper and pencil and write as many words as you can from the letters. Try alphabetical order, too :) 

2 - Make a basket of bears to put in order, make patterns, count, etc. 

3 - Program bottle tops with letters - pick one at a time and write on a dry-erase board for letter practice.

4 - Supply dice and counting bears - roll, count and write down the number for practice. 

Science kits would be fun, too! Make a box of sticks. leaves and pine cones to examine, build with, sketch, etc. I threw in stripped crayons for leaf rubbings, too.

A small magnet and some metal/non-metallic items would be a great exploratory box. Add in a bunch of large paper clips for extended chains.

If you have access to craft sticks (colored ones are even more fun!) and Velcro dots, you can make a set of attachable sticks to form shapes and letters. Just put velcro on opposite sides of opposite ends and stash them in a plastic bin - fun and learning!

Pipe cleaners and beads for beading and patterning could be another box, using things you may already have access to in the classroom. Great fine-motor work!

You could try some force and motion cars and blocks, some Playdoh for many purposes ... use what you have around to make up as many mini-boxes as you want.

Legos make a great mini-box! Grab a bunch from a larger bin and make up some minis - for fun and fine-motor play.

So many choices - you can make multiple boxes of the same items, to avoid sad faces when their favorite is taken. Make the choices extend your curriculum and keep your learners engaged, while finding time to assist all learners in completion of work. 

Everyone needs a break and some creative time, even you!

Have fun!

Learning Tools: Recycled Bottlecaps

Looking for ways to do more hands-on learning? Running short on supplies with remote and hybrid learning situations? 

Make your own learning manipulatives to use at home or at school! 

Recycled plastic bottle caps are easy to gather in a short time and come in a variety of colors and sizes. They are perfect for so many different uses - in literacy, math, and even art. 

As you work on letter recognition, you and your kiddos can put together a set of upper and lowercase letters for practice. Play a matching game with them, placing the uppers over the lowers and checking them together. You can also supply a name strip with the alphabet for self-checking :) 

Write sight words on larger caps and use them to manipulate into sentences - even “silly sentences” can be lots of fun and get your little friends interested in reading and writing :) Then, have them copy the sentences down for some writing practice - good fine-motor work!

At math time, use different colored bottle caps to make patterns - ABAB, AABAAB, ABCABC. Repurpose your collection to act as counters when making up or solving addition and subtraction number stories, or practicing basic math facts. See what other uses your budding mathematicians will come up with! Maybe sorting by attributes - size, color, ...?

Finding art applications is easy, too! Some friends may use them as “tiles” in a mosaic or to arrange into pictures. Others may use them as stamps or tracers with pencils to incorporate shapes into designs. They can also be glued into 3D forms as parts of sculptures, possibly using other recyclables. 

The opportunities are endless - see what your kiddos come up with! 

Have fun!

 

Playing Store: Consumers and Producers

Playing store can be a great play experience for your kiddos, but why not really make it meaningful?

With a little help, your children can participate in PBL (project based learning) by creating their own products, "pricing" them, and "selling" them.  It sounds complicated, but it truly is not :) 

As an example, one small crew made bead bracelets and duct tape bookmarks, as part of an open-ended craft activity. (Great fine motor work, BTW!) Some were very elaborate, therefore more "expensive." The artists and artisans were the "producers." When they had a bunch of “products” finished, they laid them out and examined them, counted up the sale items, and came up with a pricing system. They kept it simple with $1, $2, and $3 items, but this could be adjusted if you wanted to make change or work with harder numbers.

All items were then priced and the kiddos turned our dramatic play area into a store display area. They arranged their goods, and some friends made signs to show "consumers" where to shop. They all discussed how much each item should cost, and tagged items with sticky notes.

For the consumer side, children then took turns being shopkeepers and customers. This required a little adult intervention, to model being the paymaster, and to sort out roles. Shopkeepers could earn "Kid Cash" while working and then save it up to go shopping with later on. A few customers were given some cash on loan, to get the process started. Customers with no cash yet had to window shop, plan, and wait until they made some money to spend. All roles revolved, so all students got a chance to be producers, shopkeepers, and customers.

When it was time to be a customer (or consumer), each child had to budget their teacher-issued “Kid Cash” in order to purchase what they wanted. Decisions had to be made about items that were too pricey, or not within the budget, and the dollars had to be stretched to stay within budgets. 

On the sales side, adjustments were made to prices if items weren’t moving well and small groups of students spontaneously got together to make those judgements. It was awesome to watch them start to take ownership of the store :)

Throughout the process, lessons were learned, the children could tell about the process that we “studied” :) 

AND we had so much fun!

* This lesson was done pre-COVID-19. Adaptations could include quarantining supplies for a few days in between segments and setting up a store play center using precautions seen in actual stores (such as clear partitions and hand sanitizer stations), “normalizing” these scenes for students. This would allow for some play interchange, while maintaining distance and safety precautions.