Its been waaay too long since I posted our Practica activities and since I know by sheer numbers in traffic on Practica posts that this is what you guys want, I’ll give it to you!
Cause I’m that awesome 🙂
From 3 years on Practica starts to get really fun for moms and kids. The only hard part is going through the manual to prepare your day’s work so let me make it easier for you by sharing mine 🙂
I like to include one of each of the groups of development every day we play so in this post, with only 6 easy fun games your child will develop the following :
- Major Muscles and Coordination: Body Awareness and Laterality
- Fine Muscles and Art: Manual Dexterity and Creativity
- Visual Perception: Shape Perception
- Auditory Perception: Auditory Conceptualising
- Mathematical Development: Numerical Conceptualising and Counting Skills
- Language and Thinking: Association, Numerical Conseptualising, Shape Perception
1.Body tracing
- Develops Major Muscles and Coordination: Body Awareness and Laterality
Place 12 white A4 pages next to each other and stick them together with tape.
Turn it over and trace the outline of your child’s body with a pencil and go over it with permanent marker or paint.
Draw a lateral line through the middle of the paper body and paint the two sides a different colour to show your child that the body looks the same on the Left and the Right side of the body, but that there are two sides. After the paint dried I also folded the paper body in half to visually depict the symmetry.
Fold the limbs where they would bend when waving or flexing a muscle. Let them do it themselves and talk about the movement and where it bends to help them visually perceive where the bend would be on the paper body and have them point out where it would be. Afterward I drew circles at all the joints while naming the knee, ankle, hip, shoulder, elbow, wrist and neck to give an even better perception, but do allow them to try and find the joints first. Don’t worry if they don’t, its just to get their mind working on where it would be.
I also drew eyes, a mouth and a nose and let them stick the pieces with prestik where they should go. Its amazing to see how good they do it when they have an indication on where the midline is.
2. Clay Play
- Develops Fine Muscles and Art: Manual Dexterity and Creativity
Roll snakes and balls with clay. Show them how to roll snakes by rolling a piece of clay between their hands and show them how to roll ball by moving their hands in circular motion. Help them establish the right amount of pressure by squeezing their hands between yours while helping.
Make faces or cars or trees or whatever you can think of with the balls and snakes and show them how to flatten it against a table or tray. Keep the dimensions simple for now.
3. Yarn Triangle
- Develops Visual Perception: Shape Perception
Place a triangle of about 1,5m on the floor by attaching yarn with prestik. Crawl along the outside and let them stop at the corner and tell them to turn Left when they are going around their left side, and right when they are moving along their right side. They may not know right from left yet but it gives them a perception of left and right and teaches them by repetition. You can let them crawl like a baby, jump like a bunny, walk like a dinosaur on all fours and leopard crawl, all first to the one side and then to the other but don’t forget to let them stop at a corner before continuing to help them perceive the corners of a triangle by feeling it in depth, space and distance.
4. Clap to music
- Develops Auditory Perception: Auditory Conceptualising
Use the music cd from the box and let them clap and play to they rhythm by banging wooden spoons on a tin can (or one of the Practica containers) or let them use the wooden blocks as cymbals.
5. Count and Play
- Develops Mathematical Skills: Numerical Conceptualising and Counting Skills
This was by far our most fun activity. My manual specified to build a dice with only 1-3 dots on it by taking apart some of the other dice, but when I wanted to take them apart, I realised my dice can’t take apart and that the specified dice was already included in my set, so if you have that dice, don’t bother, but if you don’t, yours can probably be taken apart. Use two 1 dot pieces, two 2 dot pieces and two 3 dot pieces to build your own dice.
Now take the dice with the different colors on them and take out the no. 26 card from the peg board set. You will use the pictures on the right of this card for this exercise.
Let the child roll both dices separately. Let them count the dots on the dice and name the color on the other. If the dice fell on red, the child has to clap their hands the amount of times the dice fell on. If its blue, they have to stomp their feet, yellow they have to turn around, orange they have to stand up and sit down and green (not on the picture card) they have to count the amount on the dice. I let mine count to ten instead.
On this picture above, they had to clap their hands twice. If you have two children, let them take turns to throw the dice and let each one do their own activity.
6. Association Game
- Develops Language and Thinking: Association, Numerical Conseptualising, Shape Perception
Place 6 associated pairs of pictures from the picture set on the table. Each pink card goes with a green card… they’re not all that easy so make sure you choose pictures that are easy for kids to match. For every match they make, give them a circle from the multi mast set as a reward. There are only 5 circles but you do 6 pairs as the last set will be whats left over and not a match that the child made.
For more Practica Activities, Click On the Images Below:
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