First Friday Q&A : Make Handwriting Practice Fun and Playful! | Not Just Cute I’m taking a little break as we welcome our fourth son to our family. Enjoy this First Friday Q&A from last year (also available at YouTube here). Here are some ideas for helping children build handwriting skills in novel and playful ways. Watch the video and then add your ideas in the comments section. (Bonus for those watching carefully during the mirror segment: You’ll see the pile of clothes my boys dropped as they raced out to the Slip ‘n Slide.) Handwriting Helps Build Small Motor Skills: Fine Motor Skills Page {PreKinders} Tons of ideas here! Handwriting {PreK Pages} Tips through the whole writing process – from FM skills to putting pencil to paper. Letter Formation: Tactile Letters Kit Wikki Stix Alphabet Fun Cards for Learning Pencil Grip: Preschool Song: Teaching Proper Pencil Grip Pencil Grip: How to Teach Your Child How to Hold a Pencil Properly Fun writing tools and surfaces: Chalk and Chalkboard Magnadoodle Whiteboard Markers On Sheet ProtectorsOn Picture Frames On Windows On Mirrors Salt
Learn to Draw Animals Print and enjoy our Learn to Draw Animals pages for kids of all ages. Kids can use our step by step illustrations to discover how to draw all sorts of animals and build up their skills and confidence in the process...plus they are just good fun! You could build up a whole folder of these printable pages for rainy days - teachers might even want to laminate them and keep them ready as a time-filler or reward. By special request, save yourself a lot of clicking and grab all our learn to draw animals, birds, bugs and sea creatures in one easy download! Learn to draw this cute chimpanzee just by following the steps and copying carefully. Whether you are looking at African animals, primates or even Ancient Egyptian Gods, use our learn to draw a baboon guide to add some fun. Have you ever wanted to learn how to draw a badger? Whether for Halloween or any time, kids can learn how to draw a bat with our fun step by step tutorial to print and copy. Bees are favourite summertime project.
5 Top Sites To Download Free Kids Music That You’ll Love If you’ve got kids, you’ve no doubt thought about how you might be able to increase the size of their music collection for free. I mean, who wants to listen to the same CD of nursery rhymes over and over again, right? So in order to keep your sanity while your kids listen to their favourite songs, the best trick is to have more of them – and the higher quality you can manage to find the better. Thankfully, the Internet is full of free music and fun things for kids. Here’s a collection of sites which have a large amount of kids songs for free, just waiting for you to grab them. Remember: DownThemAll When checking out these sites and other sites of free music, don’t forget that there are tools like DownThemAll and Wget which make it really easy to download all of the MP3s in one hit. Jamendo Kids Music Check out the Jamendo Child/Kids/Children tags (and perhaps the Jamendo Enfants tag) to browse hundreds of free albums for kids. Free Kids Music Nancy Stewart Music Dream English
Royalty-free Sounds - Richard Byrne The Free Music Archive provides free, high-quality, music in a wide range of genres. The content on Free Music Archive is used under various creative commons licenses. The New York State Music Fund provided initial funding for FMA. PodSafe Audio, is a resource that I discovered last summer and had some of my students use last year. Sound Bible is a resource for finding and downloading free sound clips, sound effects, and sound bites. Royalty Free Music hosts music tracks that can be reused in numerous ways. Jamendo is a source of free and legal music downloads. From the same people that brought us the great computational search engine Wolfram Alpha comes Wolfram Tones. Monkey Machine is a free web-based program that allows students to experiment with drum set sounds and rhythms. Image credit: Flickr user Dyanna.
How To Make "Clean" Play Slime Home Hacks | Apartment Therapy Ohdeedoh Previous image Next image We have yet to meet a child who isn't into slime. Icky, sticky and awesome is where fun is had and this version keeps kids and surfaces both, clean along the way. It only takes pennies to create and is liquid one moment and solid as a rock another! What You Need Materials:1 1/2 cup Cornstarch1/2 cup Tap WaterFood Coloring (optional)Liquid Extracts (optional)Empty Container Instructions 1. 2. 3. 4. Additional Notes This mixture can be "eyeballed" in any amount. (Images: Sarah Rae Trover)
Play Dough Rangoli Mandalas | NurtureStore By Cathy James on June 14th, 2012 Yesterday’s Play Dough Pizza Parlour was all busy activity and co-operative playing. Today’s Play Dough Pledge idea is very different. It’s quiet and gentle and sensory and mindful. My 5-year-old has been ill this week and play dough has come to our rescue. Play Dough Mandalas On offer we had: orange play dough made using our favourite no cook play dough recipe :: bottle tops and lids :: a selection of added extras including pearl barley :: brown, orange and puy lentils :: cumin and caraway seeds The colours and textures and scents of the pulses and spices bring lots of sensory elements to the play. L remembered how we’d used pulses to make Rangoli patterns for Diwali so we decided to see how this would work with play dough. To make the rangoli mandalas she took a blob of play dough and pushed it into a bottle top. The addition of some fancy sugar tongs was popular. She came up with a variety of designs for her play dough mandalas. Get the book!
MetroDad: The Rules: 25 Life lessons for my daughter My father has never given me any advice. The one time I remember him even trying was when I was 18 and on my way out of the house for the evening. As I recall, he briefly looked up from his newspaper and said, "You know about condoms, right?" End of conversation. Thank you, Obi Wan Kenobi. In all seriousness, it always deeply wounded me that we never had any of those father-son conversations where he would counsel me about life and give me lessons of an admonitory or hortative nature that might provide a road map for how to live my life. Needless to say, ever since my daughter was born, I've been bombarding her with advice on a near-daily basis. My list of lessons that I want to pass down to her is virtually endless and constantly changing but I thought I'd write some of those lessons down here. Some of these lessons are humorous. However, all of them are true... (2) Lennon, not McCartney. (3) Life is too short not to order the fries. (6) Don't worry about being popular. (9) Never cheat.
Garden at Sainte-Adresse, Claude Monet, 1867 Oil on Canvas