Tag / writing

by arTree

Cards for Moms

Making gifts for moms has become a ‘thing’ in my classroom now.

We make gifts for them almost every day. Kids want to make pictures for their moms. They want to pick flowers for them. They want to wrap pieces of papers as presents for them (the more of them there are and the more colorful they are the better, obviously).

I scored a box of old (yet amazing) greeting cards at a garage sale and when the boys found them in our tinkering space, they were amazed. They immediately wanted to use them to make cards for their moms. True, some of them were wedding congratulations, Christmas cards, Valentine’s Day cards… but when the kids combined them together, glued some gems on top and wrote a personal message inside, I think nobody minded.

by arTree

Typing Away…

typewriter

Olivetti 44 typewriter from 1950s (made in Barcelona) just joined our literacy center.

I was so thrilled when I discovered this gem at a local antique store. I had to buy it right away! It is exactly what I was hoping for: amazingly cool piece of 70-year-old technology that can get the kids excited about writing. There is something really fun about seeing how the typewriter works: how it changes the color of the tape, how the letters stamp on the paper, how you move the paper up and down and left to right… unlike computers (that we love and try to incorporate into our days as well) typewriters make it so easy for the little engineers to actually see what is going on in the machine and how it works. They are fascinated by them, and honestly, I don’t blame them.

I hope it will keep the kids excited about literacy and engineering for the days, months and years to come! I’ll upload some of the letter we wrote 🙂