Construction

Things have been too crazy this year to write my lesson plan out (which takes almost no time, it's just that nutty, ha!), so I thought I'd just jot down some things we did for future reference.

- We used Duplos for the gathering activity, and the kids loved it! They wanted to use them a lot more, so it was great to be able to promise it would be happening during choosing time. I also set out Trios during choosing time.

- The kids love construction trucks. My books, both illustrated and real photographs, were a hit

- We watched a time-lapse video of a house being built, and I couldn't believe how much the kids liked it. It was 6 minutes long, and I was prepared to do something else, but the video had their complete attention. After the video we talked about the different phases they noticed, and as luck would have it, they see a lot of those things in real life, so we talked about it.

- We talked about blueprints, then dipped duplos in white paint and stamped them on blue paper to make our blueprint, or "building plan." The first day the kids totally just did whatever, not necessarily a blueprint, and that was fine with me. There was a lot of learning and observing with just the stamping. The next day we talked about building plans again, and a few of the kids caught on.

- We used play dough and building blocks together. The play dough could be the cement or decorations or whatever. They liked it, playdough is always fun.

- We read "Not a Box" and "Too Many Toys", books about kids imagining with boxes. The kids then had markers and boxes and created things with them. I could have done more with this, but we had limited time, so it was basically just a choosing time option.

This was a topic that could go in so many directions, but we had a limited time, and really enjoyed the simple things we did!