Mama Bear, Mama Bear, what do you see?
Teachable moments staring at me.
Activity: Grow Pals
Materials:
- Two identical Grow Pals or other water expandable items. (I’ve seen these at the dollar store and at Hobby Lobby.)
- Cut out Shapes.
Concepts Targeted:
- Little and Big
- Bigger
- Shapes
- Listening and Following 2-part directions
- Working Memory
These Grow Pals were another Dollar Tree purchase. Just drop them in water, wait a day, and they start growing in size. The package says up to 600% growth over a few days. I don’t know if we got 600% growth, but there was a distinct change in size. Each day we checked on the horse in water and talked about how it was getting “bigger.” On day three we were able to take it out of the water and compare it to the one we had kept dry. Now one was “little” and one was “big.”
Here we worked on putting the little horse on the yellow circle, and then the big horse on the red circle. This was great because it allowed us to work on two-part directions. Two-part directions are important because the child has to use his working memory to store the information about the first direction while trying to follow the second direction, i.e., finding small and then finding yellow.
I bought up a bunch of the Grow Pals; horses, cars, monkeys, etc. These are great because once they dry out, they shrink back to their original size, so you can use them over and over again.
This would also be a great way to work on teaching mama or papa and baby animals. Any other ideas?
wordsofhisheart 