Denali Ready to Greet the Kids

Today my son and I introduced a whole new generation of Baltimore kids to mushing and the Iditarod at a toddler play date that our school was involved in.  The kids had great fun standing on the runners of the sled, trying on the headlamp, playing with all the stuffed dogs, and yelling command to Denali – the one and only dog on the team!

Pattern Making

They did a bit of math as well.  Kids of all ages had a lot of fun stamping patterns with colored paw print stampers.  Alternating color patterns were by far the favorite (as was skipping the whole pattern idea all together in favor of just having fun stamping!) but a few kids did more complicated patterns.  One little girl even patterned the directions the paw prints were facing which was really clever.

The older kids did a great job with ordering numbers of dogs in front of a model sled.  It was super easy to set up, I just cut out sixteen sled dogs from the Jan Brett site and wrote the numbers from one to sixteen on them so that the kids could lay out a whole team.  It has been a long time since I’ve worked with little, little kids – so it was fascinating to watch.

Sequencing Numbers

My son, who is now in second grade, did it by counting backwards from sixteen so that he could put the last ones right in the wheel dog position.  The younger kids started with one and counted forward, so they had to keep moving the sled backwards.  It struck me that you could even use the same activity to count odd and even numbers forwards or backwards so that you’d end up with one line of odd numbered dogs and one in of even number dogs.  It was neat to see the kids process the numbers. Some could put them right in order and some had to go back and count from one every time to determine what number came next.  They were both really great activities to get an idea of where the kids are with their number sense.

It was a fun day… and maybe those of you who teach younger kids can use some of the ideas in your classes!

I got the Jan Brett dogs here:  http://janbrett.com/mural_tsb/mural_tsb_sled_dog_facing.htm

And the paw print stampers here:  http://www.orientaltrading.com/paw-stampers-a2-12_3660-12-1.fltr?Ntt=paw%20print%20stampers