After 15 years teaching everything from preschool to high school, veteran teacher, published kids’ book author, literacy volunteer, and our very own senior product manager Marcia Gresko knows all too well the ins and outs of creating fun and engaging lessons for any classroom! Here is a word from Marcia herself about some Classroom activities she did with her kids during the Fall season:
Here are 2 hands-on fall activities I did with my pre-kinder classes during our fall study of Native Americans.
The first is a cooperative weaving activity. The “loom” is made from 2 wooden bars, jute-like string, and beads. You drill holes in the bars, string the jute through the holes, and secure it with beads to prevent it from slipping back through. Then I hung it at kid-level from 2 hooks on the door of one of my classroom cupboards. Children took turns weaving strips of scrap, thrift-store fabric “under and over, under and over” the vertical string. Don’t worry if they don’t get it close to the previous strip. They can just push it up next to it when they have finished their turn. I added strips with children’s names from the bottom to finish off the activity. They came out so beautifully we entered one of them in our community’s Old Hometown Fair, and both hung in my classroom for years.
The second is a simple, cooperative totem-pole activity. The children painted boxes, added cut-outs, and stacked them up.
BTW, in case you are wondering, we did discuss that Native Americans were not all one people. Different groups lived all over our country and those groups lived differently depending on their location.