Categorie: Fine Motor Skills

Geplaatst in Brands, Craft material, Development, Fine Motor Skills, homeschooling, Little Brain, TEFL, Toys

Review : Little Brain Paint Sticks

Gepost op door Emine

I love doing crafts, but let’s face it painting often creates a mess. In my lessons that’s why I almost never use paints and at home while homeschooling well how bad as it sounds…. With 2 kids… a 2 year old and a 4 year old letting them paint is a big struggle. Whether is is in the classroom or at home water cups always spills everywhere, pictures need to dry, not to mention clothes that get wet and painted on. I found a great solution…. Little Brain Paint Sticks.

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With the paint sticks there is no need of water and the pictures don’t need to dry. It washes off easily from clothes and the colors are nice and very bright. They also come in a nice metal edition and since we love glitters those are perfect for my girls. They also last a long time and don’t dry out.

My kids definitely are big fans. You can color with them but also use them as a stamp as we did on the turtle that you can see below. You can experiment with mixing colors and without any mess. Believe me my kids love to color next to the paper or on themselves and it cleaned up nicely and easily. According to the website you can also use it on windows, but we didn’t try that (yet).

  • Stamps on the turtle
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Arts and crafts made by my 4 year old

I know that as a TEFL teacher you often don’t have any input in the materials purchased or used, but it might be worth it to try and convince your management to ask the parents to provide these to use in the classroom or to ask your management if they can provide a few sets. I prefer this over pencils, markers and crayons to be honest.

Disclaimer: The reviewed product wasn’t subject to any sponsorship. I purchased it myself. I do am open to sponsorship, but will always mention it when I received a product to review.

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Geplaatst in Development, Fine Motor Skills, TEFL, Toys, wood

TEFL Review: Wooden beehive picking toy

Gepost op door Emine

This game is very well liked by my kids. It is great to use in a one on one lesson or for home schooling. The concept is fairly easy place the bees in the right place in the beehive. You have to be a bit inventive to use it in class but it is doable. I’m really happy with the quality after almost a year my daughter finally managed to pull of the wings of 1 of the bees. She loved fiddling with it and tried a really long time to get them off.

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This game of course is used for really young learners. You can add it to an animal or bug theme. It is great in one on one lessons. It is also great to use with toddlers because it is great to develop their fine motor skills. In class I use it either in one on one or on learning stations or to present the subject bugs/bees/beehive.

Beehive

How to use it? Well as I said the main purpose is to place the bees in the right place in the beehive. You can ‘make mistakes’ so the children can practice true or false/correct or incorrect. The children obviously can practice their colors by saying which color bee is that is placed incorrect. Another classroom favorite is which bee is missing. The children sit around the table, eyes closed, I remove one or more bees and the children need to tell me which bees are missing. It is also a great way to make students start to combine words. Instead of just saying red, they must say red bee.

Beehive

However I also use it to do math all in the purpose of CLIL teaching, I do it more with first and second grade students. How many bees are there? We have put 2 bees away. How many more do we need to place? Or the missing bees game but with how many are missing.

And how about using it for learning prepositions of place. Which lets face it is sometimes hard to make them remember. In, next to, on, between,… You can all demonstrate and practice them with the placement of the bees.

For a very simple toy there sure are a lot of options. It all depends on your imagination. I’m planning to start to record video’s on how to use these different toys.

Disclaimer: The reviewed product wasn’t subject to any sponsorship. I purchased it myself. I do am open to sponsorship, but will always mention it when I received a product to review.