Charlotte Today: Indoor Activities

Our Director of Monkey Business April was featured on Charlotte Today this morning discussing some fun indoor activities when your monkeys need a break from the heat.

When it is too hot to even go to the pool or a summer storm ruins your outdoor fun, head inside and ignore the screen with these fun, educational and motor sensory developing ideas.

Children need plenty of short, fun activities that will allow them to use their hands and develop hand/eye coordination in a way that swiping a screen just cannot do! And it’s a bonus if these activities also develop and support letter and number recognition and formation, math skills, color identification and more.

{These ideas work with children ages 3-5.}

Letter Recognition and Practice:

Here are fun letter activities for children before even putting a pencil in their hand to write letters. And if your older child complains when it’s time to practice handwriting you can pull out these fun tools and they won’t realize they are “working!”

1. Use shaving cream on a cookie sheet  or in the bathroom to write letters, sight words and more.
2. Create sensory bags filled with gel or shaving cream and trace letters of name, names of people in house, vowels, constants, etc.
3. Hide and find letters with large letter magnets in sand for younger kids or smaller ones in play dough or molding dough for older kids. Turn it into a game to see who can find the most vowels or consonants, once you find them all see who can make the most words out of the found letters.
4. Use Fundanoodle Muscle Mover cards for engaging activities to get the wiggles out before using the back to build letters with play dough and pipe cleaners.
5. Use Fundanoodle I Can Build kits and I Can Pound kit to build hand strength and letter recognition.

Math, Shapes and Numbers Practice:

1. Use clothes pins for a homemade sorting game.  Roll a dice and use the clothes pin to pick up pom poms or other small items and sort into cups or containers for young children to work on counting and sorting, greater than and less than. With older children you can use cards with math signs (plus, minus, equal) and create simple math problems with the pins or other items. 
2. Use puppets for picking up items to work pincher grip and hand strength.  Use a timer to pick up items and move them into cups and then count the items and determine who has less and more. You can then sort colors and even make charts of the colors.
3. Have a race to fill cups by having children guess how many beads (or other materials such as beans) will fill the cup then count them to see how close you are. You can also use a dice to roll and fill cups based on numbers or time how long it takes.
4. Use Fundanoodle bead cards for shape and color recognition.
5. Have squirt bottle races  in big pot or the bath tub with floating bath toys. Move the toys with the squirt bottle to the other side (this is great hand strength!) as a race or guess how many squirts it will take or which things move faster or slower. This is also great outside in a baby pool!

What other fun indoor activities are you doing with your children this summer?

To watch the clip from the show click here: http://www.wcnc.com/charlotte-today/Pre-school-games-263497081.html

Therapist Thursday….Letter Reversals

By: Michelle Yoder, OTR/L

Young readers and writers frequently have letter reversals: b instead of d, p instead of q, and even a 6 rather than a 9. It is concerning to most parents, but remember that this is quite normal for children under the age of 8. You may wish to have your child evaluated if he or she continues to have reversals or exhibits “mirror” writing (right to left and backwards) beyond the age of 8 or the second grade.

Literature suggests that children need repetition and emphasis on the individual letters.  As well, children should be read to every day.  Early readers should be encouraged to read street signs and other signs in the community, packages, labels in the grocery store, etc. While I have not found one trick that works for every child, these are some things that I have learned and that have worked for me over the years:

Teach them their right and left hands- play Simon Says, teach them strategies such as “I write with my right”, or my left hand forms an L.

Work on jumping or moving their bodies to the left and to the right.  We use a sign with three rows of arrows going in each direction, or even up and down arrows to represent forward and backward.

Make sure they understand directionality- top, bottom, sides, straight lines, diagonal lines, etc. I use Fundanoodle’s Magna Strips to practice this.

Work on crossing the midline of their bodies with soldier marching or with rainbow writing (draw a rainbow or the infinity sign) on a large piece of butcher paper.

Provide boundaries for writing letters for early writers.  Window panes and window markers are a fun way to do this! Then, move to boxes on paper to give them a boundary while they first learn to write their letters.

Work on visually scanning to locate items on a page, foster scanning in a left to right direction- if necessary use a piece of paper to “block” out certain parts of the page.

Encourage them to begin their work on the left side of the paper first.

Perform kinesthetic writing in shaving cream, play doh, hair gel, pudding, etc.

Provide visual cues in the room near the alphabet strip or on their desks:

Show them that if they start with an upper case B and erase only the top half, it still is a b!

For a lower case b- the bat comes before the ball

For a lower case d- you need a doorknob to open the door

A lower case b has a belly- this will make sense to them if they know that they move from left to right across the paper.

For the number 6- the circle sits on the bottom on 6

Make phonics bags: identify the letter, say it out loud and then trace and write the letter

For some children who have continued difficulties with reversals and writing, in general, it can be helpful to move right onto cursive! Just last week, I had a boy tell me that cursive is so much easier for him than printing! He was all smiles learning to write with Fundanoodle’s Cursive book.

Therapist Thursday….Dollar Store Finds Part 2

By Amy Bumgarner

Fundanoodle’s I Can Build Letter kits are a great multi-sensory way to allow your child to practice using his or her body to construct or write a letter before writing with a pencil on paper.  Other multi-sensory approaches you can use in conjunction with the kits include: sidewalk chalk on concrete or carpet squares, writing secret messages or pictures, and building straight lined letters or objects with popsicle sticks.

Fundanoodle’s Max and Alphies Adventures”workbooks are great for working on visual motor skills necessary for handwriting.  Using hands-on  2D and 3D manipulatives, such as puzzles and magnetic shapes are also great ways to work on those skills too!  do this before or after practicing in the Max and Alphie Adventures worksbooks to maintain the multi-sensory approach that is the basis for Fundanoodle.

“Y” Build Letters?

by: Michelle Yoder, OTR/L

Ask any kindergarten teacher:  Learning to write the letter “Y” can be a challenge for little hands and developing minds!

Look at this actual example.  We worked with a little girl the “old-fashioned” way, just putting pencil to paper, first demonstrating how the letter is form, then “assisting,” and then, letting her write it herself.  (See where we even added extra yellow “dots” as cues to help her?)

Then, we took a break and “played” with Fundanoodle’s Magna Strips from the I Can Build Uppercase Letters Kit, using the special shapes to “build” the letter “Y.”  Our young student constructed the “ Y” several times on her own, , wrote it a few times on the dry-erase board, and then, returned to the paper instruction sheet, where, as you can see, she wrote it with ease!

What a great example of using multi-sensory writing and instruction for the greatest possible success!

Max and Alphie Go to School!

What fun!  Today, my monkey friend, Max, and I got to learn about two letters – “Bb” and “Ll.”  Even better, we got to play and learn with some terrific four- and five-year-olds.  We were a little nervous, but the teacher was really nice.  She didn’t make us do anything at first.  She had a nice voice and asked us sit in a circle and watch her write the letters.  She showed us how important it is to start at the green line at the top, before zipping down to the red line at the bottom.  Then, she hopped back to the top where she buzzed around two times to make the capital B.

Then, she let us explore the room and all the different centers.  At the bead table, we made new friends, while stringing beads to match the card on the table.  Max really liked coming up with his own patterns for stringing beads!

At the art table, we got to trace Halloween shapes and decorate them with glue and sparkly paper.  I traced a scary bat, and then, copied the word “b-a-t” on the shape.  Lucky for me I had just learned how to write a “b”!  I knew exactly where to start, thanks to the green and red lines the teacher showed us.

All the kids thought it was lots of fun, and the teacher said that tomorrow, she’ll teach us how to write the next letter.

We like school!  Maybe we can visit your classroom next?

Max and Alphie

Teachers Love Fundanoodle!

Boy, do we love hearing from parents and teachers who love using Fundanoodle at home and in the classroom! Erin Webber, a Kindergarten teacher at David Cox Road School sent us these pictures of her kindergarten classroom learning and practicing their upper case letters with Fundanoodle.

One of Webber’s students using the “I Can Build Uppercase Letters Kit”.

Brian practicing his letters with the “I Can Write Upper Case Letters” Activity Book.

“My kindergarten kids love to use Fundanoodle in centers! They especially love the I Can Pound! Activity Bench and the I Can Build Upper Case Letters! Kit,” said Webber.

Fundanoodle activity books and kits are a ready-made resource for classroom use. Here are just a few of the many ways you can use Fundanoodle in your classroom!

–  Fundanoodle activity kits make ideal workstation activities for preschool and kindergarten classrooms.

–  Floor pads can be used as a free-time activity.

–  Writing tablets are ideal for kindergarten and first-grade teachers.

–  Gross motor cards are great for inspiration during every day PE class or for rainy day recess activities.

Are you using Fundanoodle activities and products in your classroom? Which ones and how do your students respond?