Last fall, I saw a lot of cute children’s book character pumpkin projects surface all over social media! While the pumpkin characters are/were super cute, I feel like the project limited itself to only the fall season. With that being said, I wanted to come up with a similar project, but one that could be done ANY time of the year and with minimal cost as empty K-Cups are used as the base of the character! AKA~ Book Character K-Ups! How’s that for sustainability and upcycling!
Toys purchased from stores can be expensive only to have children play with them for a brief period of time before setting them aside for something else. Empty boxes and containers, on the other hand, make great toys and allow for way more imagination and creativity. Better yet, they don’t cost you anything extra as you were probably going to recycle them anyway! Let students learn about the value of cardboard toys as they explore and engage in the following lesson.
There are many aspects of children and art that can be incorporated into a child development class. When exploring Children & Art, you can look at everything from its benefits to development, to why it needs to be open-ended and focus on the process over the product to how we talk about it with children. This lesson and corresponding activities infuses all of the above! Have a look to see how you can include children & art into your repertoire!
I spent time this past summer browsing on the internet and reading teacher comments on Twitter. One of my favorite things is to watch TedTalk videos. I kept coming across ideas that what we teach students will be obsolete in 40 years, many future careers have not been invented, how fast knowledge doubles, advances in artificial intelligence, brain research, etc. So, what’s a teacher to teach? Or more importantly, what is it that students must be able to know and do to thrive in a future world full of unknowns? You may have additional thoughts but some of mine are students must be literate, be adaptive, be problem solvers, be able to think-outside-of-the-box, use technology, communicate effectively with others, work with others, and re-invent themselves in the workplace. Then, for the first time in my long career, my school adopted a partial block schedule with the first 2 days of the school year being block days. Students need to have positive experiences so they want to come back the next day plus I didn’t want to bore them. So, I wrote the Gidgee Gadget lesson. Take a look below to see what it’s all about!
