Manipulatives give children the opportunity to interact with the alphabet through hands-on play.

They are able to feel the shape of the objects and arrange multiple items to form letters and words.

They can see the curves and the lines that come together to form each letter, and some manipulatives even allow children to explore letter formation and tracing.

We used manipulatives (in this case, letter cards) as part of our bat theme.

To do this, we did a couple of things.

First, the students were given a note card with the word BAT written on it.

Then, they were given the cards (manipulatives) to match to the correct letter.

Lastly, we sounded out each letter until we created the word!

There are many activities children can enjoy that will improve their pre-writing skills. If you visit some of our other tracing activities, you’ll find lots of great information on the importance of pre-writing skills, what they are, and how to develop them.

Tracing lines is just one way of helping children get ready to write.

And they don’t even have to pick up a pencil to do it. It’s valuable to start out tracing with fingers because holding a writing tool can be tricky!

So as part of our ghost theme, your little one participated in an activity that honed their tracing skills. With a few simple materials, we learned about the letters that make up the word GHOST. Throughout the week, we talked about the letter G.

We then discussed the sounds that G made. Following this, we sung a song about the different words that start with G. Lastly, we used flower and glitter to trace G,H,O,S,T!

Sensory activities play a key role in the maturation process of young children.

Activities that require manipulation and touch enable children to heighten the adaptive response through their senses.

They are an integral component in early childhood education.

They not only engage the child, but stimulate cognitive development.

To access this, your young one participated in an activity where they made ghost slime!

Using corn starch, googly eyes, water, and glitter, we manipulated and created various combinations to create the perfect consistency for our goo!

Before learning to count,  a child needs to understand one to one correspondence.

This means being able to match one object to one other object or person. 1:1 correspondence is simply the ability to match each member of one set to the member of an equal set.

Usually when we think of 1:1 correspondence, we are only thinking of matching one of something to one of something else, but this concept also includes matching two of one thing to two of another thing, or three, or four, or five, or a hundred (and on and on and on). For this activity, we practiced our one-to-one correspondence with bat erasers and numbers.

Using tweezers, students placed their erasers into an ice tray. Within each cube was a number (1-6). Students were instructed to match their numbers to the correct number of erasers that they were instructed to count out. In addition to one-to-one correspondence, this activity also targeted fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination.