Modifying Activities

Good teachers modify their instruction to meet the individual needs of the students in their class. I realized the other day, I can start doing this more at home with the boys as well.

When S was about 18 months, I had made him this disk insert activity. I got it out for M to begin exploring and realized I could easily update it so that S could still learn from it as well. I simply added numbers to each disk so that they needed to be inserted in order.  Now both boys can benefit from the same activity! 

Themes are also a great way to organize your activities so that children of multiple ages can benefit. 

Paper Clip Math

Sorting

Patterning

Counting



Sticker Word Matching

Here's a new tray activity that both S and I love...

Step 1:  Get a sheet of stickers (I cut this one in half because it repeated the same animals).
Step 2:  Write the words for the sticker pictures on a sheet of paper (I used the back side of recycled fliers to save paper).
Step 3:  Let your child match the sticker with the word.

I like this because it's so fast and easy, but it also develops good literacy skills because S has to use a variety of strategies to determine sticker placement (beginning letter sound, final letter sound, decoding, pictorial context clues, elimination, guessing).

I think this would also be easy to prepare several in advance for a flight or road trip.