Monster Manipulatives

In the past few months that I have been blogging, I have posted quite a few post that deal with the suppers and thangs part of my blog, but very few that dealt with the youngans.  So....today I am giving you one for the youngans in your life.  I teach Early Childhood Education at a local high school.  This is a class that teaches high school students the basics of working in the early childhood profession.  I am also the director of our on campus preschool.  This is where my students work and practice the skills they learn in class.  So what I am sharing with you today is an actual activity I have planned to use with the preschool children this week.  We are doing a week of "Marvelous M."  Every activity that we do will begin with the letter M.  On Friday we have plans for several monster activities.  When I was making the plans I needed a manipulative (pre-math) activity to go with monsters.  I began my search on the Internet.  I was looking for printables that I could use to  make matching monsters for the children to practice their visual discrimination skills.  I didn't find anything that I really liked.  I knew I could free hand some monsters, but to get two free handed monsters that look just alike is near impossible.  Yes, I could have used the copier and simply made a copy of each monster so they would be exactly the same, but I had another idea. 

I decided I would free hand my own monsters making each one completely different.  They would be different colors and some would have legs and some wouldn't.

I cut them all out.  I decided some would have round eyes and some would have square eyes, some would have one eye and others would have two, some would have teeth, and some wouldn't, do you see where I am going with this?

I assembled the tools I needed to make the eyes, mouths, and teeth.  I free handed the eyeballs, squares and circles of varying sizes (monsters have these big uneven eyes so don't sweat it).  I used a hole punch to make the pupil of the eye and I mixed it up and made them of differing colors.  Then to make the mouths I free handed some black strips for the mouth and used decorative scissors with a jagged design to make the teeth.  A glue stick kept them all in place.

After I attached all their faces, I laminated them because I knew that after they were handled by 18 small little hands their faces would be falling off. 

You can have your children sort them by those that have legs and ......

Those that don't.  You can sort them by color, by those that have teeth and those that don't, those that have one eye and those with two eyes, those with round eyes and those that have square eyes. 

I hope you are inspired by these cute little monsters.  The old saying "necessity is the mother of invention" was sure the case as far as this activity was concerned. 

Renee