I’m continuing a thought from last week, disovering more of life’s teachable moments.

Teachable moments prove to be so enriching because they are “in the moment” and personal. The kids are automatically motivated because they are relating to the concepts at that exact moment. They are experiencing the concepts first hand, bringing home the idea they need to “get their hands on it” in order to understand something.

That is what a teachable moment does. It also pertains to the environment in which you are in. However, does the learning need to stop there?

Absolutely not! Extend the learning experience: for instance, I previously mentioned our “teachable moment” at the beach with shells so let me enlighten you on what happened next. We all collected shells and brought them home to our shell jar. The next day I happened to be introducing the letter S to my Pre K Scholars class.

In Scholarville “S” is for “Steven,” who shovels sand on the seashore; the shells were a beautiful hands-on supplement to the activities already provided in the kit. They were very popular amongst my students. They sorted them in a variety of different ways and their reasoning for groups and classification skills were impressive (color, size, type,shape). They counted them (which provided an assessment in the way of their one to one correspondence ability,how high can they count, number sense, number value etc.). They created patterns with them and they put them in order form smallest to largest and largest to smallest. We discussed size differentials. All of this and so much more so don’t let the learning stop at the beach—collect some shells to take home and while you are at it, grab a bag of sand for another multitude of fun activities!

A few ideas: Have the children practice writing their names on a sentence strips with glue. Once they have completed their name have them sprinkle sand (collected from the beach) with a spoon over their name. Shake off the extra sand and voila!, they have their name written in sand. When it dries they can trace over the textured name to practice directionality of writing the letter in their name.

Extending lessons and getting creative with weekly letters is my all time favorite thing to do. S week is full of so many wonderful activities that teach so many useful skills. We used star stickers to count, add, pattern, sort. We introduced sight words and started with the word “SEE” and began to read simple sentences like “I see a__________.” We did sequencing with shells. We used different shapes to create sandcastles on a page before we added sprinkled sand on for some sand art. We reinforced our scissor skills with many cutting activities—all of this and so much more were inspired by using Steven shoveling sand by the Seashore in Scholarville as our springboard!