I am currently teaching from home while my 5 year old is also at home attending virtual kindergarten. The times that she is on the computer with her teacher are amazing. She participates, she is engaged, she is loving it. (however, she still asks me every day when she can go back to school)
The issue arises when she is on her breaks, specifically, her break from 11am to 1:50pm. Unfortunately I am trying to teach live for at least 2 of those hours so I needed to come up with things that would keep her busy. I reached out on social media and someone suggested busy boxes.
I took a couple of trips to The Dollar Tree and came up with these 7 busy boxes.
Box #1:
This box uses a container, alphabet flash cards, and rice. She draws a flash card and then uses her finger or the eraser end of a pencil to trace the letter in the rice. Give it a shake and draw another card.
Box #2:
This box uses a container, play-doh and shape flash cards. She picks a flash card and then uses the play-doh to make the shape.
Box #3:
This box uses a container, kid's tweezers (found in the school section) and two bags of beads. She can use the tweezers to pick up the beads (works on fine motor skills) and then sort them by size, color, make a pattern, etc.
Box #4:
This box uses a container, pipe cleaners, and 2 bags of alphabet beads. I created my own sight word cards (find them here), but you could use index cards as well if you don't have access to a printer. She draws a sight word card and then uses the beads to spell it while putting them on the pipe cleaner
Box #5:
This box uses a container, dot marker, sticky notes, and number flash cards. (I split the number flash cards into 2 groups and saved the other half for another project). She picks a flash card, then uses the dot marker to put that amount of dots on a sticky note.
Box #6:
This box uses a container and clothespins. I created my own version of clip and cover cards to focus on matching uppercase and lowercase letters. I am working on others as well, so those will be in a future blog post. You could also use index cards for this as well.
Box #7:
This box uses a bag (because I didn't buy a container large enough to hold the dice), stickers, dice (2 for a $1), and sticky notes. She rolls the dice. Add the two numbers together. Then put that amount of stickers on the sticky note.
A few things that I have learned while letting her explore this week. I had to learn to let go. While I made directions for all of them, the end goal is that she is staying busy and keeping me alone while I teach. This means that when I come back and her hands are green from the dot marker and she has drawn a picture instead of making dots. It is totally ok. When she put the sticky notes all over the house... it is ok. When she wants to just play with the rice, play-doh, or beads... it is ok.
I see myself making more of these in the future because they were fun to put together and she enjoyed helping me. Stay tuned for more!
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