With all this talk of turkey, our tummies have been rumbling!
Today I placed a "set the table" basket in the dramatic play area.
The basket included a die, a set of plates, cups, napkins, a tablecloth, place mats, forks, spoons, and knives.
The task was to roll the die and set the Thanksgiving table for the specified number of places.
On the surface, it is a simple math task. When you really sit and watch the children you see how much thought really goes into the activity. Between these 2 pictures you can see that the boys and girls figured out that the place mats have to go first!
Although the die clearly states that the number of guests is 5, now, the first time we tried it, didn't seem like the time to interfere... After all, they were still working with one-to-one correspondence. Each chair had a place mat and each place mat a plate and each plate a cup and so on.
I loved the opportunity to teach the boys and girls about how to set the utensils at each plate.
What a fun and meaningful way to practice left and right!
Before long it was time to serve the food!
Clean up brought us a whole new batch of opportunities.
The cooperation shown here was amazing, as well as the communication exchanges between the children.
They had obviously seen things folded enough to know the basics.
"You get the corners and put them together".
With just a little organizational help from us,
The task was complete.
The little basket that we placed out held far more the objects inside it. It was a literacy based, math lesson (seriation, ordinal numbers, one-to-one correspondence) that incorporated science/health (food pyramid), and social studies(holidays and tradition), gross motor skills (folding), social skills( planning, coordinating, sharing, conversation) and much more!
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