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PRIMARY
Odds & Evens
1 MATH Place a "town mat" or "road mat" on the floor. Use houses from toy train villages or make houses out of small boxes for the children to line up along the streets. Help them make house numbers on little flags or sticky paper labels to put on the roofs. Have all even-numbered houses on one side of the street, all odd-numbered on the other. Go for a class walk around the neighborhood to observe "real" building numbers. Only the last digit needs to be read for a child to determine if it is odd or even.
Colorful Stories
2 WRITING/ART Purchase a coloring book and remove its pages. Give one page to each child to color and write a couple of sentences to explain. Then come together and sequence those picture stories into a longer story. Vote on a title and mount it on a bulletin board. Will the story fit a genre? Did anyone use dialogue? Add little text bubbles as necessary between frames.
Mother's Many Names
3 LANGUAGE/DRAMA Teach this finger play to the children; have them practice it for Mother's Day.
Mother's Many Names
Her children call her Mommy,
(Extend five fingers; point to the thumb)
Her children call her Ma.
(Point to the index finger)
Her children call her Mama.
(Point to the tall finger)
But never, ever Pa.
(Shake head "NO!" vigorously)
Her children call her Mumsy,
(Point to the ring finger)
Her children call her Mum.
(Point to the pinkie finger)
Their children call them MOTHERS,
(Wiggle all five fingers)
And hug them when they come.
(Wrap fingers of opposite hand around "Mother" fingers)
by Jacqueline Schiff
Plink, Plank, Plunk
4 MUSIC/SCIENCE/ART Use a plastic single-piece pie container and some string or rubber bands to illustrate the various sounds made by different lengths of string. Ask students to design their own object for demonstrating the same principle. Make cardboard, string, various containers, etc. available for their use. Discuss what this tells about stringed instruments and how they are played. Invite a guitarist or violinist to visit your class and demonstrate their skill. See your librarian for books like Making Music With Stringed Instruments by Erica Smith (Rosen, 2003), which is beautifully illustrated and...