EASY TO PREP EASTER PATTERN BLOCK PRINTABLES

Easter pattern block printables your children are sure to love playing with this Easter!

Pattern blocks are one of my most favourite materials for encouraging block play in class and at home.

What are pattern blocks? They are collection of 6 different coloured small shapes made from either wood or plastic. They have been in classrooms since I was when I was in preschool. I still remember playing with them in my mother's classroom.

Few can resist playing with the different shapes to make symmetrical designs and tessellations. Pattern blocks can also be used to create themed invitations like we have done with these Easter pattern block printables.

HOW TO BRING STEM TO YOUR ENGLISH LESSON

Bring coding to your literacy centers at school, adding STEM to your English lesson in a fun hands-on way using fairy tales.

With a crowded curriculum no matter where in the world you teach, we're always looking for smart ways to integrate different learning areas to improve student outcomes.

Using fairy tales in the Early Years is one of my favourite ways to teach many aspects of literacy and they overlap beautifully into other areas of the curriculum like Maths, Art, Design and Technology too.

Recently in class, we've been using the text 'The Gingerbread Man' which is a perfect fit for sequencing and writing recounts and also lends itself well to introducing coding in the Early Years.

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Some might argue that coding is the new literacy. I've used Beebots and coding apps on the iPad like Kodable and Scratch Jnr before with great success in the classroom.

Coding in schools has become a hot topic and one I'm certainly excited about integrating into the Early Years at school.

Learning to code used to be seen as something only few people could do but now it's become far easier and more accessible to our children. Coding can now be used as a tool for learning but rather than just wheeling in the iPads, I wanted to bring elements of coding to our play!

Literacy centres have always been a regular feature in my classroom and offer an easy way to create invitations for play for small groups of 4-6 children.

They're perfect for recreating and retelling stories shared in class that the children are familiar with, helping to build vocabulary and language as well as social skills between the children.

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We've just finished using the text 'The Gigantic Turnip' and have begun reading 'The Gingerbread Man' which allows for easy text-to-text comparisons and is perfect for starting to look at text structure and writing recounts. After seeing some of the coding invitations created by educator Deanna McLennan, I wanted to bring some hands-on coding to our English lessons too.

'The Gingerbread Man' allowed us to tie our focus on parts of a text - characters and setting together with beginning to code. 

The children had to help the gingerbread man get safely to the river, past all the characters from the story who wanted to eat him.

I created a new set of story stones using images available from Twinkl and added them to our homemade grid.

I also added a coding box to the literacy center. You can grab you own copy of our cards for FREE from the link at the bottom of this post.

The children worked together to position the characters first across the grid then used the different arrows to find a safe path for the gingerbread man to follow to the river.

And the best part, it is all moveable so the board can be reset over and over even by the same group of children.

You can grab your FREE copy of our coding cards here.

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HOW TO HELP CHILDREN TO LEARN TO SPELL

Help your students 'crack the spelling code' and learn how to spell by focusing on word families or CVC words once they can recognise and distinguish between letter sounds.

Once a child has a firm grasp on letters and the sounds they make, teaching them how to use that phonemic knowledge to read and spell comes next.

We are not born understanding language but most young children develop an understanding of spoken language well before preschool. Learning how written language works takes far longer and requires more explicit teaching but is still strongly tied to a child's ability to process oral language.

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VALENTINES PATTERN BLOCK CHALLENGE CARDS

Free and ready to print, just add some wooden patterns blocks to begin using these Valentines Day STEAM challenge cards which combine maths and art in one kid friendly project.

A few years ago I created our pattern block challenge cards for class and my students loved them! Block play is a favourite activity in class but I wanted to extend the type of play I was seeing while creating an opportunity for children to read independently and problem solve too. With that in mind, I created some different sets of printable challenge cards to go with our pattern blocks.

And many of you love them for the higher thinking they bring to your maths centers while also making differentiation easier across busy classrooms. 

Two things definitely on the wish list of any teacher.

Our challenge cards are the perfect addition to pattern blocks which are irresistible to young children and adults alike. Just add them to your maths centres or small group work to help engage. 

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