#15minutecircletimes, #preschoolhomes, #earlychildhoodthemes, #preschool, #homeslessons, #circletime, #largegrouptime
Attention Getter: Whose Home Is This?
(A week before you teach this topic, ask parents to send a picture of their home to you. They can simply take a picture of it on their phones, send it to you, and you can print them out for class.)
At circle time take out one picture at a time and ask the children "Whose home is this?" When a child recognizes it as his/hers, let him/her come up and place it on the board. The children will be very excited as they realize that the pictures you are showing are their homes! Show a picture of your home as well.
Ask, "Do homes look the same or different?" Discuss responses.
Ask, "Why do we need homes?" Discuss responses and/or write them on the board as children respond.
Activity 1: Homes in Many Cultures
Homes in Many Cultures by Heather Adamson is a fantastic book that shows homes from all around the world. Show the pictures and read the parts of text that you feel are most appropriate for your group. Reemphasize the concept that people live in many different types of homes.
Story: The Three Little Pigs
We have a very simple story of The Three Little Pigs that we created. It has very simple drawings and follows the basic storyline of how the Three Little Pigs went off to build their homes and how the Big Bad Wolf tried to blow it down each time. As we tell the story, we emphasize which materials would build the strongest house and why.
(This approach to storytelling is simple and magical. The students love it every time!)
Scroll through the pictures to see how "simple" our story of the Three Little Pigs really is! You can certainly create something similar.
Activity 2: What If...?
For this activity, create a cardboard house so you can discuss the many important parts of a home.
This is an example of how we did it. Picture 1 shows the Foundation. Picture 2 shows the Walls and Window and Door. Picture 3 shows the People (We hot glued them in place). Picture 4 shows the Roof. Picture 5 shows the complete House.
Name the parts of a house as you build it in front of the children. Emphasize how their homes have each of these components as well. Then, take off the roof and ask the class, "What if your house didn't have a roof?" Discuss answers. Continue the process as you take off the window. Then the door. Then the walls and finally the foundation and finally the people. Help the children discover why each of these components is very important to a home. Encourage them to go home and see if they can find all of these parts in their homes as well!
(We have never heard the children use the word "foundation" as often as we have after teaching this lesson in preschool!)
Bonus Section:
Want to see what we did for our Creative Project today? It worked great and the children loved it!
After talking about the parts of a house, we gave the children their own plate with 8 Dots candies on it. In the middle of the table we placed trays with toothpicks and marshmallows. We reminded the children about the importance of a strong "foundation" and suggested that the Dots candies would be good for that. Then we showed them ideas for how they could use the toothpicks and marshmallows to construct the walls and roof and etc. for the house. The children created so many different styles of constructions and we could see their thoughtful concentration throughout their work.
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