Complete-A-Clock Printable

My son can count by fives, so why is it such a struggle for him to figure out the minutes on an analog clock, I wondered. To help practice telling time and reinforce counting in increments of five around a clock, I created a printable inspired by a wall clock arrangement that Mrs. Lemons posted on her blog, Step Into Second Grade (Isn't that clever?!).

Download a PDF of the Complete-A-Clock template here.

I laminated the Complete-A-Clock printable so my son could write on it with dry-erase markers. (I have a feeling this will get some heavy use throughout the year.)

For our first exercise using the blank clocks, I had my son read Is It Time Yet? by Lesley Jane. (Any children’s book with clocks would work great, such as Jenne Abramowitz’s adaptation of Hickory Dickory Dock or The Clock Struck One by Trudy Harris.) Before I handed over Jane’s book, though, I used small post-it notes to cover the clocks on each of the pages.

As he read sentences like, “Kelly woke up at 8 o’clock …” I had him write the time in the blank digital clock and then draw in the hands on the analog clock above it. When he’d read the whole page and filled in both clocks, he could remove the sticky note in the book to see if he got the time right. He was so excited with every clock he drew right and only made one error doing the whole book (that’s progress, for sure!).

When he has advanced past telling time on the hour and minutes on the fives, I’ll add some marks between each of the numbers and start challenging him with times like 8:23 or 11:47. Hopefully with enough practice, he’ll be ready for this sooner, rather than later.

Only time will tell ...

Tornado in a Bottle

So far the tornado sirens have only gone off twice this Spring/Summer season. This is a reality of living in the Midwest; tornadoes are the worst kind of severe weather we experience here (although one could argue that flooding and copious amounts of snowfall are no picnic either).

To give my son the closest glimpse of a twister that I hope he’ll ever get, we decided to make our own tornado in a bottle out of two, 2-liter plastic soda bottles. This is a pretty popular science project and after doing it, we know why: it’s SO cool!

Simply fill one of the bottles two-thirds full with water. Add food coloring if desired. Place the second, empty bottle upside down atop the first and apply duct tape liberally to the neck of the bottles. Expect the bottles to leak some.

Once taped, flip the bottles and swirl them in a circular motion. Watch the water spiral from the top bottle to the bottom bottle in a tornado shape. (Even little brother thought this was awesome!)

After we finished, we read Charles and Debra Ghigna’s Step-Into-Reading fiction book Barn Storm. In this book, a twister moves farm animals to unexpected new homes. The cows now sleep in the children’s bedroom at night. Super silly!

Finally, my son watched a short montage of video footage of tornados on WeatherWizKids.com, the site with the tornado-in-a-bottle instructions we used.

Our conclusion … tornadoes are cool to make and cool to watch on video – but NOT so cool to experience.

Let Me Introduce the Grassheads Family

They come from humble beginnings – just trash and dirt and some old pantyhose. Oh, and grass seed too. I’ve been dying to blog about this activity for two weeks, but growing grass takes patience and until our family had enough hair, you just wouldn’t have gotten the full effect.

When I stumbled on Ms. White’s First Grade classroom blog and saw her class’ adorable grass-headed fellas, I e-mailed her straight away to find out how she’d done it. I knew my son would think this was cool. (He'd be crazy not to, right?!?) She kindly pointed me to Disney’s Family Fun site for instructions.

To teach my son about growing plants from seed, we read Joanna Cole’s book, The Magic School Bus Plants Seeds: A Book About How Living Things Grow. Then we got our hands dirty.

What you need:

Pantyhose foot (ones without reinforced toe would look better)

Soil (1 c. per grasshead)

Grass seed (2 tbsp. per grasshead)

Googly eyes

Recycled yogurt cups

Scrapbooking papers, embellishments

Double-sided tape

Permanent marker to draw a smile

School glue and/or glue stick

What you do:

Use double-sided tape to add decorative papers to your yogurt cups for “shirts.” Glue on additional embellishments.

Then cut the foot off of your panty hose (I found this to be quite liberating!). Fill the toe with 2 Tbsp. of grass seed. Top with 1 cup of soil. Tie the excess pantyhose in a knot and leave a 1-inch tail. Add a smile and glue on googly eyes.

Fill each cup half full with water. Set your grassheads on top of the yogurt cup shirts, making sure the pantyhose tail is dipped in the water (it will act as a wick and soak up the water).

Monitor your grassheads daily, adding water up to the half-full mark when needed. In seven days, you should see some grass beginning to sprout. After about 2 weeks, your grassheads will have a full head of “hair!”

These were just as much fun to make as they were to watch grow! Not only did my son learn about growing plants from seed, but he was responsible for checking them each day to see if they needed to be "watered."

Fun. Educational. And, pretty darn cute too, I'd say.

Under Construction (a Greater-Than Less-Than Game)

Rather than just doing drills to practice greater than and less than with two numbers, I thought I’d make a little construction game for my son. I was pretty sure that using LEGOs would add just the fun my son would need to be enticed to play learn. I was right.

I made three cards: two of a front-end loader whose scoop formed the < and > signs, and a truck whose grill made the =. (Download the cards I made here.) Then I created a game mat with two piles of dirt and space in the middle where one of the cards would be placed.

 To download this game mat, click here.

All that was left to do was grab a small bowl of LEGOs. Before my son played, I explained that some workers needed help constructing a building. Building blocks were being delivered to the construction site.

It was up to him to determine which pile of LEGO blocks was bigger; place the greater-than, less-than, or equal card in the middle; and if he added the correct card to the game mat, he could use the biggest pile of blocks to build with. If the piles were equal and he added the pick-up truck card, he could use both.

I explained that the front-end loader only wanted to pick up the biggest pile, so its scoop should be facing towards the largest number of blocks.

He grabbed a small handful of LEGOs and placed them on each of the piles of dirt. 

After tallying each pile and placing a card, I had him write the equation in his notebook. Then he could get building. He completed about a dozen problems. The last round of play, there were three LEGOs on one pile and none on the other.

My son LOVED this. When it was done he said, “Finally, you made an activity with LEGOs!” If only I’d thought of this sooner …


Check out other great math ideas and activities at Love2Learn2Day's Math Monday Blog Hop!

Word-Family Trees

We’ve been having so much fun with math and science, that a reading-related activity was LONG overdue. Identifying word families is a great way to advance your child’s reading. To practice these, I drew up a bare tree and added some word endings to the three main branches.

Then I used a big leaf-shaped punch to make small maple leaves, on which I wrote the beginning sounds. All that was left to do was have my son match up the letter leaves to the right word family!

My son concentrated so hard on matching up the beginning and ending sounds and would exclaim with excitement each time he made a word! I simply spread some Elmer’s glue on each branch and let him add the leaves. If children work on one word family at a time, you might want to make some extra leaves so the final family is still a challenge. (I neglected to do this and when the first two families were done, it was no work at all for my son to place the remaining six leaves on the last branch. Oops!)

For a little writing practice, I had my son write each word in his journal as a list.

I made five Word-Family Tree worksheets; download the free PDF via Google Docs here. A list of the word families is also available here.

Wouldn’t this be awesome to do with leaves punched from papers in fall colors? Or to make flowers with beginning sounds written on the petals, circular tentacles on an octopus … ok, ok, ok, I’m getting a little carried away. But, seriously, this idea could be repeated with SO MANY variations and if you’re a teacher, wouldn’t a forest of these trees hanging around your room or on your bulletin board be super cute?!?!