Spring Flowers -Simple Craft for Following Directions May 3, 2012

Going along with the spring theme, I had a little fun today making spring flowers to decorate my tiny room (which I am very thankful for). I remembered how much fun my students had making snowflakes and the fun discovery that happened when they opened up the folded and cut up piece of paper.

Simple instructions on how to make paper snowflakes

I modified this idea to make simple and very colorful flowers to greet a new season. I printed colorful spring scrapbook pages with images of flowers and bugs and printed them double sided so that when the flower is made you could see the other colors on the reverse side. This activity is great for performing directions (in a specific order) several times, so you can have your students learn the task, review the task, and hopefully by the third or fourth time they can retell the directions back to you.

I helped my students follow directions to fold the paper. For the ones who needed limits on where to cut, I drew lines on their papers, and for others, let them go at it alone. Then poked a green pipe cleaner “stem” through the middle and TADA!!

Let’s play with trains-Review April 11, 2012

Atech Let’s play with the trains!

This app for iPhone, iPad touch or iPad is a great free beginner app. It has a simple cause and effect interface that no matter where a child touches or draws a train track will appear. once a line or squiggle is drawn, it is soon followed by a variety of trains with really cool train sounds.

Something I like about this app is that it doesn’t have too many options so when using it for a reinforcement activity the kids can take a quick turn without obsessing over specific features.

There are several options that can be controlled:

• A picture of the scene can be posted on twitter (not sure why this is needed):bird in the lower right hand corner
• The background can be changed (great for conversations and where the trains are and where they are going):arrows in the lower right hand corner
• Clearing the tracks to start again:garbage can in the lower right hand corner
• Pause: bottom right hand corner
• Info (in app purchases to remove adds, and download all their other apps): “i” in the top left corner

All of these option are tiny on the iPhone/IPod touch, and hard to manipulate by little fingers. However, the Ad on the bottom of the screen  is quite easy to activat

e by little fingers. I would suggest purchasing the app to remove the In App Ads or to turn on airplane mode, so that little fingers don’t access the appstore or twitter.

Overall this is a great app, and a lot of fun for kids 2-6 yrs of age.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/atech-lets-play-trains!/id455193538?mt=8