Category: Early Childhood

Don’t Take My Playdough

Playdough

The following story comes from my friend’s blog. It was told to him by his sister-in-law.

The funniest story happened yesterday at church. Our minister [Mike] was preaching…All of a sudden the side door of the auditorium burst open. A little three year old is running and yelling, “No, no, they are after me.”

Mike [the preacher] stops and asks, “Ryan, who is after you?”

“They are after my playdough.”

Mike laughs and yells – “Run, Ryan, Run, here they come. Don’t let them get your playdough. Run to that door over there, that side.”

The little boy takes off squealing, gripping tight to his playdough. The whole congregation breaks out in laughter and applause as Ryan breaks through the side door with his playdough and the embarrassed teacher enters looking for his lost pupil. It was priceless. Ryan was screeching as he broke through the door to freedom.

I wish I had been there! 🙂

Suggested Reading for 03/03/2008

I’ve found the following to be interesting reading material. I’d like to write a full post regarding each but I just don’t have the time. Instead, I’ll just mention them and suggest that you take a look at them.

Happy birthday, Dr. Seuss.

Designing Interactions

Top 10 Ed-Tech Stories Still Resonate in 2008 – from eSchool News

Taking the One Laptop Per Child XO Laptop to the Preschool Classroom – Anne provides several strategies that she has used with preschool children.

Carl Dickerson gives the gift of literacy to low-income children – We need more people like this.

What I’d Teach the Teachers – An interesting perspective on effective teaching.

Is Plagiarism a Problem for eLearning?

Take a free course from MIT.

What Do They Need to Know?

Interactive Periodic Table

Does Testing Crush Creativity?

Teacher Dropouts: Why?

NETS-S: First or Second Edition?

Educational TV Programs

I’ve been pleased to see a resurgence in quality educational television programs recently. Even better is that our kids are choosing to watch these programs over the just-for-entertainment children’s programs. Both the teacher and parent in me would like to take the creators of these shows out for pizza to say thank you. I hope this is a trend that we see continue to grow.

Here are some of the shows that I’m talking about. Be forewarned that the educational value in a couple of these won’t be immediately obvious, so watch the program in it’s entirety.

  • FETCH! with Ruff Ruffman – Problem solving, math, science, engineering, team work, research/ scientific method
  • WordGirl – Language arts, vocabulary, literacy, problem solving
  • Super Why! – Reading, phonics, vocabulary
  • Cyberchase – Math, science, technology, problem solving, data collection and analysis, trail and error, real life application
  • Gerald McBoing Boing – Music, history, creativity, audio learners
  • Pinky Dinky Doo – Vocabulary, story telling, imagination, creativity

I know there are probably others, but the kids are all asleep and I can’t ask them for help right now. Please share your comments and suggestions as I’d enjoy the feedback and ideas.

Free Concept/Semantic Mapping Software

The following free software programs are good alternatives for concept/ semantic mapping technologies like Inspiration and OpenMind. These are helpful in the development of concept/ semantic maps, flow charts, diagrams, timelines, and more.

Free Open Source Software (FOSS)

I’ve run across several lists of free open source software (FOSS) in the last few days. I’ve added each to my del.icio.us bookmarks (see My Bookmarks in the main menu) but I wanted to a bit more proactive in sharing this information with teachers, thus the reason for this post.

Free/Open Source Software for Kids – This list was generated for those teaching 3-12 year old students. It suggests FOSS for music composition, painting, space exploration, math, and more.

KDE-Education Program – This group is “developing high-quality educational software for the K Desktop Environment. Our primary focus is on schoolchildren aged 3 to 18, and the specialized user interface needs of young users. However, we also have programs to aid teachers in planning lessons, and others that are of interest to university students and anyone else with a desire to learn!” You’ll find about 30 educational software games/ tools related to math, science, languages, art, keyboarding, and more.

23 Most Valuable Free Software – A list of the most outstanding free/open source software.

GIMP – “The GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.”

Exploratree – Exploratree is a free web resource where you can download, use and make your own interactive thinking guides, concept/semantic maps, organizers, charts, tables, and more.

Firefox – A cross-platform browser, providing support for various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. However, the source code has been unofficially ported to other operating systems. This project has a large community of external contributors. If you haven’t already switched from Internet Explorer to Firefox (or at least something else) then I strongly suggest that you consider it.

Blender – “Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite.”


For even more, you can also review my previous notes on other FOSS and TeacherJay’s Free Software Guide.

Free Educational Software

My friend Neil Hokanson had an interesting post on his blog about a suite of open source (which also means FREE) educational games for young children. The software is called Childsplay and is available from SourceForge.net. Neil explains that Childsplay has “several games in the software that test basic math and language arts skills along with other exercises that practice matching, listening, and memory skills. The activities help children learn fine motor skills as they navigate the computer keyboard and identify specific number and letter keys, mouse, and mouse pad movements.”

I encourage those of you with learners that are under 10 years old to take a look at Childsplay. Please share your review of the games in the Comments below.

Clif