Blog: Middlers

It’s Friday! After a rainy and cool Thursday, today looks like it will be warm. We hope these invitations offer exciting opportunities for your young child.

Sensory Invitation: Colored Ice Sensory Play (an invitation for this afternoon or tomorrow)
Supplies: Water, Ice Cube Trays (or small containers you could freeze ice cubes in), Food Coloring.

Freeze your colored ice cubes for several hours. When the colored ice cubes are frozen take them out and have your child explore what they can do with them. You can use them outside if it’s sunny and warm to see how they melt on the ground. Add them to water and have your child watch how the color from the ice cube mixes with the water as it melts.

Intent: This allows for the middlers to see the different properties of water as it is seen in it’s liquid and solid form. This also gives the middlers a chance to explore what ice feels like with their hands and how it looks as the colors melt together.

Fine Motor Invitation: Sorting Different Shapes. Find three baskets/containers and label them with a triangle, circle, and square. Find different objects in your house that are those shapes and sort them into the baskets.

Intent: This activity incorporates fine motor development by using their hand muscles to pick up and place each item in the basket.This activity promotes the use of the pincer grip by grabbing some of the smaller items with their thumb and index finger.

Art Invitation: Smush Paint. Put different color drops of paint on a piece of paper and stick the paper inside a gallon plastic bag. Push and spread the paint around to create a beautiful masterpiece!

Intent: We encourage the middlers to continue using art materials to express their creativity. Having them help place the tape will help strengthen fine motor skills.

Music and Movement Invitation: Sing and Dance to “Old MacDonald”, but include animals that you might not see on a farm. Examples: unicorn, elephant, polar bear, leopard. You can also do a yoga variation by doing the animal poses.

Intent: The middlers LOVE singing during meeting time and all throughout the day. We want to encourage the middlers to keep singing every day and will give examples of some of their favorite songs! We also want to give the middlers an opportunity to express themselves through movement while listening to their favorite songs.

Outdoor/Nature/Gross Motor Invitation: Number Line Run

Draw a line down the sidewalk with chalk and marked off the numbers from 0 to 10 (or higher if your child has been practicing counting higher). Have your child walk the line while counting the numbers. You could also call out numbers and have them run to the number you called out.

Variation: Instead of writing numbers you can write letters and do similar activities. Have your child say the alphabet as they walk past each number. Call out a letter and have your child run to that letter.

Intent: Get outside and enjoy the nice weather and beautiful spring scenery. We want to encourage the middlers to use all of their big body muscles to enhance gross motor development. This activity also enhances cognitive development by including number and letter recognition.

It looks like it will be a wet and cool spring morning today. We hope these invitations offer inspiration for your young child today.

Sensory/Fine Motor Invitation: Making and exploring Moon Dough

Moon dough is easy to make and only requires two ingredients.

In a bowl mix two parts cornstarch with one part conditioner. Four tablespoons of cornstarch and two tablespoons of conditioner makes enough for a small exploration. Depending on what you have in terms of ingredients, you may want to make more. Moon dough is interesting to explore. It molds well and can be easily cut with cookie cutters or a butter knife.

Intent: This sensory invitation is also a science experiment! It uses fine motor skills, and results in a new medium for creative expression.

Art Invitation: Negative space painting. Use a piece of paper and lay pieces of tape down in an interesting pattern. Have your child paint the paper. After it has dried, take off the tape to reveal your negative space art piece!

Intent: We encourage the middlers to continue using art materials to express their creativity. Having them help place the tape will help strengthen fine motor skills.

Music and Movement Invitation: Sing and Dance to “We Are the Dinosaurs”

Intent: The middlers LOVE singing during meeting time and all throughout the day. We want to encourage the middlers to keep singing every day and will give examples of some of their favorite songs! We also want to give the middlers an opportunity to express themselves through movement while listening to their favorite songs.

Outdoor/Nature/Gross Motor Invitation: Nature faces. Create a face with various things you find in your own yard. You can look for flowers, grass, rocks, sticks, etc.

Intent: Get outside and enjoy the nice weather and beautiful spring scenery. We want to encourage the middlers to use all of their big body muscles to enhance gross motor development.

It’s Wednesday! Halfway through another week. Today’s invitations center on the belief that everyone has a story to tell and that all our stories are important.

Language/Literacy Invitation: Storyteller’s workshop

Staple a few sheets of paper together and invite your child to dictate a story and illustrate it using crayons, pencils or markers. Telling stories is an opportunity for children to put their imaginings and experiences into words and pictures. It is a chance for creative expression to begin to blossom and often brings such joy to the author to see their story in a book.

Building Invitation: Build a story from blocks

After writing their story, or instead of writing their story, invite your child to tell a story using the language of blocks. This may look like building houses for the three little pigs and knocking them over, or creating a world with tall buildings, or volcanoes. You can photograph or make a video of your child’s work so they can reflect on it later when the blocks are put away.

Music/Movement Invitation: Dance a story

To connect brain, body and imagination, invite your child to select some music, possibly put on a costume, and tell a story using dance. You can do this inside or outside if your child’s story needs more space. You can share this short video of the Northern Ballet’s Goldilocks and the Three Bears for extra inspiration.

 

Good morning! Here are some invitations that we hope will interest your middler this Tuesday.

Sensory Invitation: Create shadow puppets on the wall using a flashlight or lamp in a dark room. What different shapes can you make? What does your shadow look like?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kz8wP2RYy64&feature=youtu.be – How To Make Shadow Puppets

Intent: This explores the middlers interpretation of light and dark. This also allows them to practice developing fine motor skills by creating different shapes with their fingers.

Fine Motor Invitation: Use any blocks that you want to build a house, tower, building, etc. When you’re finished knock it over to make a big crashing noise! You can also use loose parts or other objects to build your towers. How high can you build it before it falls?

Intent: The middlers enjoy building in the middler room and on the playground. This activity incorporates fine motor development by using their hand muscles to move and balance each block where they want it to go.

Art Invitation: Rainbow Tree! Find a small to medium sized, interesting looking branch. If possibly, find a bucket or pot to ‘plant’ the branch in. You want the branch to be able to stand up in the pot. Get out some paint! Have your child use different colors to paint the branches and create their rainbow tree.

** If you do not have a pot to put the branch in you can still paint it! Lay the branch out on the ground outside or on some newspaper to paint! (for an easy no-mess clean up). You can hang the branch from a string if you do not have a pot **

Intent: This is an opportunity for the middlers to practice painting on different materials other than paper. This will help develop the pincer grip, holding the paintbrush. This is another opportunity for mixing colors and experimenting with painting in different ways.

Outdoor/Nature/Gross Motor Invitation: Gather five buckets or bowls and put the numbers 1-5 on them. Search for nature items outside such as leaves, sticks, rocks, etc. Put one nature item in the bucket/bowl with the number one. Put two nature items in the bucket/bowl with the number two on it. Etc.

Intent: Get outside and enjoy the nice weather and beautiful spring scenery. We want to encourage the middlers to use all of their big body muscles to enhance gross motor development. This activity also includes cognitive development by incorporating counting and number recognition.