Hello everyone. Today’s post is a follow on from yesterdays post on a typical day in my Early Intervention Class. It was so hard to condense everything into one post, so this post is dedicated to the daily activities, games and resources we use in our class. Enjoy! x
Literacy and Numeracy Activities
If your children have limited vocabulary, it is really important that YOU adapt YOUR teaching to suit their needs. Do not expect them to know how to complete an activity just because another child might be able to do it.
The most important step before planning an activity is to find out what areas of strength the child has. So for example, if they struggle with fine motor skills, don’t expect them to be able to do a maths activity that requires a high level of fine motor skills to complete correctly – this just means even if they know how to do the activity, they might not be able to complete it because they find the fine motor skills part tough, not the actual maths activity.
Here are some examples of Literacy and Number Activities I use in my class. I organise each activity into folders and the child completes two activities during our morning table top session – 1 maths and 1 literacy. I take pictures of each activity and place them on their visual timetable. All these activities were sourced from twinkl.ie.
Fine Motor Skills
Fine motor skills are so important in younger years. It is vital that we give children opportunities to develop their FMS. There is no need for fancy materials. Simple activities include:
- Placing coins face down on the desk and asking them to turn over the coins.
- Using clothes pegs or tweezers for picking up objects
- Practice zipping up coat/schoolbag
- Opening and closing lunchboxes
We recently got shoe box task activities. These are plain grey boxes that are specifically designed to target fine motor skills. The have over thirty different task boxes in their collection that focus on a wide range of FMS such as sorting, manipulation of small objects, stacking, etc. You can find these on shoeboxtasks.com.
Cause and Effect Toys
Cause and Effect Toys are great for any child. I found that out of all our toys we had for free play, cause and effect toys were the most popular. This type of play teaches children that their actions have effects and gives them a sense of control in their play.
It is important that with any new toy, you explore it with the child at first to give them an idea of how cause (your action) and effect (the reaction of the toy) works.
Games
We are lucky as we have a ProWise Presenter in our class. Children love technology and what better way to encourage group work than to give them a task they really want to do! There are a wide variety of educational games and activities online that can have multiple players – it is important that if children struggle with turn-taking that you correctly model it for them first.
Simon says is also a nice quick game that helps children focus on the teacher. Allow them to be the leader of the game, it encourages them to be aware of the actions of other children around them.
Obstacle courses are a good way of encouraging turn taking and patience.
Water play is a great sensory game where you have one bucket of water and toys inside it – 1-3 children (depending on the size of the bucket) can play with it at once. Not all children are a fan of water play though so just make sure if your using sensory play as an activity (i.e. water, sand, rice, etc) that children are comfortable with it.
A Day in the Life of a Teacher 