Teach Preschool

DIY magnetic craft sticks

by Deborah J. Stewart, M.Ed. on February 21, 2012

in Activity Boxes,Craft stick magnets,Craft Stick Magnets,DIY for the Classroom

I previously shared how I made my own textured pizza box puzzles and during that same DIY game making spree, I also created these super fun craft stick magnets for our large magnetic board…

I purchased colored craft sticks for this process but you could certainly paint your own set of craft sticks. On both ends of each craft stick, I hot glued a magnet…

I also hot glued some of the craft sticks together to make shapes and added the magnets on the shapes…

Today was the first day I set out the craft stick magnets and the children explored the craft stick magnets on our large magnetic board…

Immediately, I could hear the children naming the shapes of the different magnets and deciding how they could make their own shapes…

This is easily an open ended DIY activity as we will be able to use the magnetic craft sticks to explore patterns, shapes, counting, colors, and more…

Super fun and super easy to make…

Links to Grow On..

Magnetic marble tubes from Teach Preschool

Magnetic play set for preschool from Teach Preschool

More pizza box games from Teach Preschool

Rainbow craft stick puzzles from Teach Preschool

More fun ideas for Craft Sticks on Pinterest!

Order Deborah's Children's CD today!

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Tagged as: Craft Sticks, magnets, puzzles and games, Shapes

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Multi-folded paint rubbings

by Deborah J. Stewart, M.Ed. on February 21, 2012

in Creative Art

Paint rubbings is a process my students love to do over and over again. A paint rubbing is generally adding paint to a sheet of folded paper, closing the paper, rubbing the outside of the folded paper, then opening the paper up to view the results…

We always use this process as a follow-up to the book titled “It Looked Like Spilt Milk” By Charles G. Shaw…

However, because paint rubbings are so interesting to my students, they also tend to go through a lot of paper and a lot of paint during the process…

So when my students asked if they could make paint rubbings again, I added another step to the paint rubbing process by having the children make several folds to their paper before adding their paint…

Folding paper is good practice in eye hand coordination and fine motor skills. We worked, as a large group, on folding our paper in half first, then folding our paper again to meet in the middle creating four folded lines on our paper in the end…

Once the children had folded their paper, then we invited them to start adding paint. Some of the children placed the paint in the fold of their paper and others added paint to the center of the folded lines…