The chairs in my current classroom weren’t cooperating so I used magnets to hold the signs to sheet pans (the same ones I use for Magnetic Spelling) that I stood up in the shoe boxes. Place two chairs, each with a shoebox on the seat, on one side of the table and affix a sign to the top of each chair. Simply assign one table per two students/teams. The labels were quick to print and easy to stick to the tops of the lids. It was the fact that the labels came 20 to a sheet that caused me to choose 20 as my number of nouns to be sorted. Again, I used Publisher to create my labels, simply printing one word per circle and telling my printer to print multiple pages per sheet. These were very slightly larger than the milk jug lids, which wasn’t a problem as they bent down nicely, but I think I’ll get 1 inch diameter labels in the future. I chose to use Avery round labels, 1.5 inch diameter. Second, I needed labels for my milk jug lids. It only took me a minute or two to make two half page signs and I simply printed them on cardstock and then laminated for durability. Since then, PowerPoint and other programs have changed and added features which allow such design work to be quite easy, but I still tend toward Publisher when making things for my classroom. When I first started designing my own games, Microsoft Publisher was the easiest program to work with for designs involving a lot of shapes and layers. First, I needed signs to attach to the back of the chairs so students would know which box to slide lids into. My non-trash supplies were easy and cheap to obtain. Thankfully, my family and friends came through for me again and I was able to obtain four of them, allowing me to avoid having to purchase condiment bottles. The final “trash” item I needed was a bit harder to come by, empty dish detergent bottles. Next, it only took a few moments in my basement to come up with a couple of shoeboxes to place on chairs as lid catchers. Thankfully, my friends are used to such strange requests and my supply quickly increased. Milk jug lids have been on my list of Toys, Trash, or Teaching Treasures for quite awhile, but this game would take quite a few lids (15-20 of eachĬolor, one color per student/team), so I asked all of my local friends to start saving them for me. uncountable nouns, a skill my students always want practice with and I’ve long wanted another practice game for. Since I was going to be teaching two level one classes in the next semester, I decided to make my first version of sliding sorts countable vs. Now that I had a general idea of what the game would be, I just needed to make it a reality and test it out on my students. In this way, they could sort words into various categories such as countable/uncountable noun, nouns that are proceeded by a/an, regular/irregular past verb, pronunciation of -ed or -s endings, etc. After some time rattling around in the back of my head, a general answer popped into the forefront: a sorting activity! Students could use empty dish detergent bottles to create air currents that would cause milk jug lids to slide across the table until they fell off the edge into a box waiting on a chair. I do not teach small children, but the game looked so fun I saved the video and stuck the basic idea in the back of my head to contemplate how I might It not only allowed them to practice number recognition/matching, but an important fine motor skill as well. The activity looked fun and perfect for young children. Sometime early in 2022, I saw this video on Facebook of a child using a squeeze bottle to push numbered lids into matching numbered toilet paper rolls with slots cut out of them.
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