Discuss the key issues in early years education in Scotland in the TES Scotland Early Years Group. This is also the place to get lesson ideas, inspiration and resource advice from other early years practitioners.
ok lol, off the top of my head...
An idea I use when visiting the nursery classes I work in is to sort, count, draw and write different objects. For example, collect a load of everyday things of the same type, like wee pegs, wooden beads, feathers, pipe cleaners, metallic numbers, coloured matchsticks and boxes of differing shapes, sizes, colours, textures etc Put the objects into sorting trays. Have the children choose a box and ask them why they chose that one. Ask the children to fill the boxes with the different objects (you will probably have to model this) and make sure the lid can go back on. The children then carefully tip the contents out and sort into wee piles. They then count their pegs for example and draw them on the paper and if they know the number, they can write that next to the picture. Repeat for other piles. Great for assessing 1-1 correspondence, sorting and matching ability, fine motor control, pencil grip, number recognition etc etc.
While I am on the subject of sorting - try to look for sets of objects that have more than a couple of uses, like compare bears which can really only be sorted by colour and size. Some ideas may be plastic insects or frogs or making up pods of objects like eggs, balls etc.
Hope this helps! :)
Just another thought...do you have use of an outside space? Use ribbons, skipping ropes, chalk or water to form numbers or shapes on the ground.
:)
I like the idea of boxes with dots on and putting in objects to match number of dots as I hadn't thought of/seen that before. I am just making some number fans so that all the children can look at the numbers and show answers, maybe they will feel more involved/less bored!
I thought we were moving away from having 30 children sat on a mat for 20 minutes, go with the active learning and split children up into smaller groups to take part in sustained shared thinking, they will get much more from the activity this way. The reason the children are bored is because you have too many and are not able to engage all at the correct level.
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