Category Archives: Teacher Resources

Sensory Tubs: A Handful of Fun

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sensory tub

As an Early Childhood Educator in the Philippines and a Certified Special Educator in the US, I’ve always believed that sensory activities provide children with another meaningful avenue for learning. Though we have a different curriculum here in the Philippines or in your school, you can always decide to incorporate learning centers in your classroom to provide for more opportunities for learning. More valuable in fact than having four to five year olds sit and listen to the teacher for more than 15 minutes. Trust me, not a good idea for these young children.

I know I haven’t updated my posts on teacher resources and some of you have in fact  emailed about teaching strategies I employ in my classroom. Here’s s peak at one of my corners.

I have a Science and Sensory Corner and that’s where I placed my sensory table/tub. I try to use different materials every quarter (operant word: TRY). My classroom does not give me the luxury of space to have as many centers as I want to but that’s never an excuse. This center should be part of your classroom. a MUST!

Cognitive Development

Sensory tubs or sensory activities promote cognitive development. While playing with the materials in the tub, they develop math skills and science concepts.

Language Development

It promotes language development too. Sometimes it’s free choice for the kids in the centers but most days, I use the pocket chart and popsicle sticks to rotate them (more of that on another post). Most of my kids want to be in the science center because of the sensory tub. I’ve noticed that they talk amongst themselves, negotiating, sometimes arguing while playing in the centers and thus promoting language development.

Fine Motor Development

There’s a lot of scooping, pouring happening in the tub and that’s what they really enjoy most. What they don’t realize is that while all the pouring is going on, they learn pre-writing skills.  Be prepared however to have spills on the floor every so often. Read: EVERYDAY! :)

Creativity

Some days when there’s not much checking to be done, I sit with the little kids and it’s such a joy to witness young children at play. Some days I hear them “scooping ice cream” and selling it to their playmate. When in fact it was all just sand or rice. This promotes creativity which builds their confidence.

The Materials

I prefer using organic materials usually food like rice in my tubs. I’ve used macaroni pasta but the corn meal and rice were their favorites. I put in the beach toys that came with the tub and some tiny cups and bowls.

That picture above was taken on the last days of school this year. Notice that the tub isn’t anymore half-filled with corn meal. You’ll have to deal with spills. I placed rubber mats under it to make the children comfortable while playing.

Will share more of my classroom centers in the next posts.

Do What You LOVE.

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Re blogged from Lead. Learn. Live.This may be a bit of a post but it just might be the best five-minute read of your life. 

I came across this post from Lead. Learn. Live. who wrote about Paul Graham’s “How To Do What You Love”. Graham’s essay  is quite lengthy but you must read its entirety that offers what may be the best-thought essay on this subject.

Sometimes it takes forever for people to figure out what they want in life. Some very lucky ones though have their Aha! moment, their defining moment early on in life. For the average person( those who are not born with a silver spoon in their mouth) will have to go through certain stages in life:college, rat race, rat race, rat race…before they say, Aha! And then they see the light.

Follow your bliss, said Joseph Campbell. But for now, we have to pay our bills :)

Let’s help and encourage each other to find that which we love doing and get paid doing it (BLISS). My husband and I have finally seen the light. We are making bold decisions and pray and hope and more importantly ACT and WORK to get there.

Even just arriving at that clarity moment, that Aha! moment brings so much energy, joy and a sense of fulfillment for yourself that you know what you ought to do. The next hurdle is what steps to take and to have the patience when to take those steps.

I have made some really bold decisions in my life very recently and I’ve never felt so alive and so excited of the things to come. My husband has taken a really big leap too. He has left the corporate world as President of a Software company. Just one Sunday morning he just declared that he is going to law school! And left his good-paying job to go to Law School! Yes, life is a choice!

I hope I’ve shared some wisdom and have inspired you to seek and wait for that Aha!moment.

-Marryl

Here’s an excerpt from Paul Graham’s “How To Do What You Love”

“To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.”

…How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don’t know when to stop searching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you’ll tend to stop searching too early. You’ll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents, or the desire to make money, or prestige—or sheer inertia.

…Here’s an upper bound: Do what you love doesn’t mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first…Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something…

…As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of “spare time” seems mistaken…I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you’ll have terrible problems with procrastination. You’ll have to force yourself to work, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.

…To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that’s pretty cool.

…What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgment you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don’t even know? …This is easy advice to give. It’s hard to follow, especially when you’re young.  Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like….Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself…Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige….Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what’s admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.

…The test of whether people love what they do is whether they’d do it even if they weren’t paid for it—even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?

…With such powerful forces leading us astray, it’s not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain. Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money. How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.

…It’s hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don’t underestimate this task. And don’t feel bad if you haven’t succeeded yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you’re discontented, you’re a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial. If you’re surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you find contemptible, odds are they’re lying to themselves. Not necessarily, but probably.

…”Always produce” is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you’re supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. “Always produce” will discover your life’s work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.

…But it’s harder than it looks. Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do. So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems.

…Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it’s rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you’ll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you’re in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you’re practically there.

“I don’t want to clean up yet. I still want to be a teacher.”

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My four-year old daughter takes out her crayons, pencils, papers and does what she has been doing for weeks now. She writes and colors and sings all the time. Before she goes to sleep, probably already half asleep, she mumbles and sings.

My husband and I know what happens in school because she imitates her teacher and her classmates. So we know what Matthew did, or who cried today or what her teacher told her classmate. Her stories are just amusing. It cracks me up most days.

Today, while I was reading something, I hear her saying or singing something. She was actually singing their circle time songs and was pretending to be in school. She was coloring and writing so I let her do her thing.

After about 15 minutes or so I noticed she was silent so I checked and found her on the stairs with some papers. I told her to clean up because the papers were all over the floor and on the stairs. Her response puts a smile on my face: “Mommy, I don’t wanna clean up yet. I still want to be a teacher.”

Today she is a teacher. Yesterday she was a mommy and her children were her crayons. Last Friday (from morning til his daddy got home from work) she was a waitress. She was holding a small notebook and a pencil and was taking orders. “What’s your order, Sir?” My husband joins in and orders “May I have some sandwich and a bottled water”. She goes, “No sandwich Sir, just water.” Some kind of restaurant she has :)

Other days I hear her saying “this is my bedroom”, referring to my laptop bag. I saw her put her tiny puppy toys in there. I think she was pretending to be a mommy and was putting her babies to sleep. I always listen to her when she is engaged in imaginary play. She does an amazing job of improvising things and imitating people, including me, my husband and her teacher!

As a teacher, I know how important pretend play is. As a parent, I am doing my best to provide her with opportunities and materials where she can engage in imaginary play. There are plenty of articles on the web that discusses the benefits of pretend play.

Here are a few suggestions that you can do to spark your child’s imagination:

  • provide coloring pens and other writing materials and place them in your child’s bedroom or near the telephone
  • empty boxes or crates which your child can use as a house
  • old shoes, hats, old clothes
  • cooking utensils

Lastly, don’t let them stop and clean up right away (just like what I did). You just might have stopped a teacher singing in the middle of Circle Time, or a mommy putting her babies to sleep, or a Police Officer directing traffic :)

Valentine’s Day Craft / Activity for Kids

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My dirty little fingerprints
I’ve left on every wall,
And on the drawers and table tops,
I’ve really marked them all.
But here is one that won’t rub off,
I’m giving it to you,
Because I’m thankful for a (mother/father/grandma/etc) just like you!

This was the Valentine’s Day Card that my Pre-K class in Baltimore made last February 2010. It’s really simple to make and the parents/guardians really appreciated the effort the kids made. The children enjoyed doing the finger-painted heart.

Things you’ll need:

  • two-fold cardstock paper
  • red and pink paint
  • red construction paper
  • pencil
  • glue

Procedure:

  1. Print the poem and mount on a red construction paper. Glue on the front page of the card.
  2. Outline a heart shape below the poem. This will serve as a guide for the children to finger-paint the heart.
  3. The children will use red and pink paint to make the heart. Dip their pointer finger to the paint and let them make small dots, alternating pink and red. Allow them to be creative and use the different colors of paint as they wish. There is no wrong or right way as the heart will look pretty so long as they fill the heart with paint in red and pink. Let it dry.
  4. Inside the card, the children may write a short message or simply, “Happy Valentine’s Day Mommy and Daddy. I Love you!” If they can’t write yet, you may write this for them.
  5. Let them sign their name.

This is a fun and very easy activity for the little ones especially Pre-K and is also a good fine-motor skills activity for them.

Advance Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

What do you want to be when you grow up?

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In the last couple of weeks, we were talking about Community helpers in school. For those of you who are not familiar with the term, this refers to the people in our community or neighborhood and their different jobs: doctors, nurses, lawyers, firefighters, pilots, chefs, teachers, etc.

To culminate this lesson we had ‘Community Helpers Day’ last Friday. This is to let the children appreciate these people who help us in our community.The kids came in different community helpers costume. It was so much fun seeing children in their cute firefighter, chef, doctor costumes.

Many came as doctors, soldiers , nurses, chefs. (big shout out to Teacher Daphne who came as a soldier. Love your costume!) Some really cool and interesting costumes were that of a nun, artist, firefighter, security guard to name a few.

I wanted Bea to be a ballerina. I thought she would look cute on it but my husband said it was too girly :) I thought about a doctor but I figured everyone else would be doctors. We finally thought of a zookeeper. I saw some pictures on the internet and thought it was so cute.

Here’s my little Zookeeper :)