Only a year ago he happily sat wherever we plopped him.

 
Now, his little feet take him where his curiousity wills, which has been to the art & craft table.

 
Set up the invitation to play with block printing:

 
Toddlers innately want to explore the world around them. They’re figuring out cause and effect relationships. When doing arts and crafts with them, expose them to as many different materials and processes as possible.

 
Place a variety of small dishes with different coloured paints and blocks on the table.

 
Vary the paints each day. Use different colours. Use paints with or without glitter. Offer thick or thin paint.

 
Use different kinds of paper. You can use plain, coloured or textured paper. Don’t forget to use three dimensional mediums like boxes or rocks for variety.

 
Helpful things to remember when doing arts and crafts with toddlers:

 
It’s about the process, not the product.

 
Step back and let him do the whole project himself.

 
Repeat experiences are invaluable so resist the urge to pack things away.

 
What about block printing for older children?

 
To extend the activity for Big Brothers N and M, we explored the beginnings of patterns and algebra with block printing.

The post Art for Toddlers: Block Printing by Pauline appeared first on Lessons Learnt Journal.

 
Macro concepts & core enduring understandings:

 
Children begin exploring number and pre-algebraic concepts by pattern making. Genuine algebraic thinking begins with the development of a child’s ability to:

• Recognise, describe, create and continue repeating patterns;
• Describe repeating patterns in terms of the number of elements that repeat;
• Understand that the equals sign means ‘is the same as’.

 
Set the stage for learning:

 
To begin, make patterns using only colours or shapes. If using colours, place a variety of small dishes with different coloured paint on the table and the same block shape (e.g. squares) in each dish. If using shapes to make the patterns, use the same paint colour in each of the small dishes and place different shaped blocks in each paint dish. To extend the activity, you may provide different paints and shapes simultaneously.

 
Provide each child with a large piece of paper with lines drawn either vertically or horizontally, well spaced from each other for the child to print their patterns.

 
Support learning:

 
Encourage a child to:

• Create a wide variety of patterns.
• Describe the patterns verbally. Eg. ‘This pattern is made from triangles. The colours repeat. They go yellow, purple, yellow, purple…”
• Label the patterns using numbers that indicate the number of elements that repeat. Eg yellow, purple, yellow, purple is a ‘two’ pattern.
• Determine if two groups have the same number of objects and describe the equality. Eg ‘The number of shapes in this pattern here is the same as the number of shapes in that pattern there’.

The post Kindergarten Math: Patterns and Algebra with Block Printing by Pauline appeared first on Lessons Learnt Journal.