Jack in the Box - Tuesday Art Linky

My sweet friend Mel has a fun weekly link up.

I wanted to share this craft we made last week for our week on 'j'.We made Jack in the Box (es)

It is actually a craft from Mels pack Craft Projects - 26 Fold and Create Paper Crafts

I took the clown template and gave it a bit of adjusting (as all good teachers do).
And taadaaa.......

How cute are they?

Lots of different skills involved including colouring, cutting, gluing, folding and peeling and sticking stickers.

Took us forever but the outcome was totally worth it :)

Bright Ideas Blog Hop

Thanks for hopping by!

DOLLAR STORE ITEMS IN THE CLASSROOM

Teachers have the ability to go into a dollar store, pick out random items and turn them into a fantastic learning activity which is engaging and relevant. I just wanted to share a couple of these ideas that I have used in my classroom.

PEGS

You can use pegs for lots of things. Clip charts, hanging artwork...but you can also use them for learning. In the pics below, we are using them to choose the medial vowel sound.

MAGNIFYING GLASSES AND FINGER LIGHTS

You can turn dollar store items into reading aids! I used these with my struggling readers during guided reading time and it was certainly more engaging!

PIPE CLEANERS AND BEADS

A fantastic tool for fine motor which links perfectly to Mathematics. You could use it for patterning, use two different colours to work on addition, or what we did in the pic below, use a tag on each pipe cleaner and students added that many beads.

PLASTIC SHOT GLASSES AND MINI POP STICKS

Another great fun activity. In these pics, I labelled each cup with a number, then students had to place that many sticks into the cup. To extend it for some, I had them order the cups. You could also do it as a colour sort, or even sight words!

I hope you have grabbed some bright ideas from this post. Please leave some of your own in the comments.

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Combining Maths and Fine Motor Skills

Another post about maths - can you tell that it is my teaching passion? I would seriously love to be a maths consultant. And this is weird because in my life as a high school student, I loved English. For those who understand this, I did 3 unit English for the HighSchoolCertificate (as well as 3 unit Japanese, but that is a story for another day).

But in my class, we are struggling with fine motor (let alone maths). And our maths time has not been much more that learning to recognise numbers, practicing writing them and playing some easy games.

Enter the pipe cleaner.

This game is another $2 gem, costing me only the $1 I paid for the stickers as I had the other components already.

So what do you need?

 A bag of pipecleaners and some long white stickers. You will also need a black marker to write on the stickers as well as some beads with a wide enough hole to slide onto the pipe cleaner - pony beads word well!

 Write your numbers onto the stickers. I did 3 different sets - numbers to 20, dot patterns to ten using the idea of a ten frame and then dot patterns to ten in a more random fashion. I did these dots to help engage the kids who can't recognise numbers.

 Fold your sticker around your pipecleaner.

 Taadaa!!! I used different coloured pipecleaners to help me be able to pull sets out for different ability groups.

The students thread the beads onto the pipecleaner based on the number or dot pattern.

As my kids progress I see more potential for this activity. You could extend it to addition by using 2 different coloured beads and writing the sum onto the flag in different colours, you could show friends of ten as well. Many mathematical possibilities all while improving fine motor.

I hope you can use these ideas in your class too!