Positional language is such a fun part of our numeracy curriculum! Today I’d like to share some activities from our Positional Language week!
Day 1 – I always start with this unbelievably annoying yet addictive video to grab the kids attention – I love using youtube to open up a new lesson with my kiddies. We had a chat about the different places that the monkey was hiding and had the song stuck in our heads for the remainder of our lives the week.
Next, the kids went up to the tables and drew their favourite part of the song. I had some kids making up their own locations and some that just used the word ‘on’ like the kiddie below. I will be working on extending their vobab to include some more description. PS The amazing date stamp skills belong to one of my helpful preppies haha – many had to be rewritten but it kept him busy for a while.
I followed the reflective drawing activity with our stuffed monkey/gorilla. We used positional language to place the monkey around our classroom and discussed where he was hiding. We will use the photos in a slideshow later in the week to reinforce some more descriptive positional language and I will also print the images and bind them into a book which we can refer to for the rest of the year.
The monkey is in front of the Sound Monster on top of the desk. The monkey is in the box. That’s where we left our first day. Short, sweet and to the point. It also helped me to see where the kids were at ready for the next lesson.
Day 2 – I love Kathryn’s [of Kindergarten Kindergarten] idea of using a picture as stimulus to brainstorm positional words so I chucked together this quick positional language picture to use with my kiddies. We spoke about what we could see and I found that when asked to explain the position, a few kids would point and say ‘there’ rather than explain using positional language. This is something I will need to work on a bit more with the kids.
Next we had a movement break and go on a bear hunt! This is my favourite Bear Hunt video on youtube – my kids always go nuts for it. We had a big talk about inside voices and staying in one spot and the kids did a great job being sensible.
We then looked at the story “On my skateboard’ on Sunshine Online [it’s amazing, go check it out and have a play with the trial, I promise you’ll want to talk your admin team into purchasing it as well].
Day 3 – Today we did numeracy rotations. Many of the activities were to do with number though my aide played a positional word bingo game [from sparklebox] with her group. She also gave the kids instructions using counters which cemented the language even more.
Day 4 – We moved on to exploring positional words in relation to our bodies by playing Simon Says and introducing the concept of left and right. We put our hands in the sky and looked for the hand that made the L shape with our thumb and pointer. The kids then traced their left and right hands into their math journals and labelled them.
Day 5 – We discussed positional language in the playground and took lots of photos. One of my teaching partners used the plates and utensils in home corner to discuss positional language – I thought it was a great idea and will remember it for next time!That just about sums up my week in Numeracy! I hope you were able to get some new ideas out of my post- I’m sure you will all love the monkey song hehe
Thank you for such brilliant lesson ideas. I have just moved to a kindergarten class after years in elementary school and was looking for ideas on how to teach Positional language. Your blog has given me what I need to have a successful lesson. Thank you
Thank you for such lovely lesson on positional language, I am a newly qualified early year practitioner and love working young children's.