Learning from Simple, After-School Activities
When Miss T was three, I picked her up from preschool every day. We’d walk up the hill to the bus stop and take the MUNI to my house. It was a fertile time to engage in simple, after-school activities to educate, while keeping boredom at bay.
The way home also served as a way into her day. What did she do at school? Who did she play with? We’d talk, sing songs and challenge each other at I Spy as we waited for the bus. We also accomplished two specific activities with learning goals in mind.
Activity I: What did we See on our Walk Today?
We used the walk to marshal our powers of observation. What did we see along the way? A dog…a child…a car…a worker on a ladder…. We made mental notes, to transcribe at home later.
Documenting our Observations
To document what we saw, I created a giant weekly calendar on a roll of art paper. (I used the $5 IKEA drawing paper roll that we stock for the kids’ easel. I typed up and printed out the days of the week and glued them to the top of the calendar.
After her snack, Miss T would use crayons to draw what she saw and I would write the words with a marking pen. Sometimes I made traceable letters–letters formed with dots that she could connect to write the words herself. By Friday, we had a complete journal of her week.
If a calendar is too cumbersome, another way to document the day would be to have the child do the drawings on sheets of printer paper, gather the drawings after a week, and staple them together to make an illustrated journal.
Activity II: Doing the Math–How Many People are on the Bus?
Because I’m no math whiz, I like to encourage the grandkids towards the math-proficiency that eludes me. So, on the bus, Miss T and I would play math games.
We’d count the number of people on the bus–usually no more than eight because our bus services a residential area and we are never traveling during rush hour. When people got off the bus, we’d subtract the number from the total. When people got on the bus, we’d add the number of passengers.
We’d do projections: If mommy and daddy got on the bus, how many more people would there be? When we leave the bus, how many people would be left?
For another after-school activity make these super-easy puppets using magazine images.
What Children Learn from these After-School Activities
- To be observant and to remember what they saw
- To order their thoughts and present their observations
- Relating their day to a specific day of the week
- Doing simple addition and subtraction
- Understanding how math can be applied to everyday situations
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