Tactile Learner - Jackie Steer

In the early childhood program, I teach the students how to manage a preschool classroom. The first thing that a teacher does in their classroom during the morning is their morning warm-up which usually consists of a good morning song where they sing hello to everyone, calendar, and weather. Morning circle can cover all learning modalities; tactile, visual, movement, and auditory. I chose to talk about the calendar and weather bear as a tactile activity. Each morning the students take turns manipulating the calendar pieces whether they are velcro or magnetic. They get to place the days of the week, the number, and choose what the weather is like that day. The weather bear gets the children very excited to pick out the appropriate clothing for that particular day. These two activities encourage the children to remember the days of the week and the month that they are in as well as what they should be wearing during each season.

From classroom personality to storybook hero, Mat Man is a favorite among young children. My high school students, as silly as it seems, still enjoy creating Mat Man. The high school students then take the song and introduce it to the children by showing them what Mat Man should look like. The preschool students then demonstrate that they can build Mat Man with marker and paper, on the white board, or with the wood cut-outs. Mat Man teaches important readiness skills which in turn the high school students are teaching the preschoolers 

• Body awareness
• Drawing & pre-writing
• Counting
• Building
• Socializing & sharing

The early childhood students hand drew penguins to put in the dramatic play center and also made an igloo out of cardboard boxes. The preschool children were learning about polar animals.

Here my students are teaching the preschool children how to draw "mat man" on the smart board.

A lesson plan on teeth brushing where a student is helping a child put mini marshmallows inside the mouth and then the child will brush the teeth with a toothbrush.

  

Another lesson plan where my students were teaching the students about their bones and body parts. They first listened (auditory) to a you tube video called "Them Bones" and followed it up with a tactile lesson where they glued q-tips for the skeleton body and a cotton ball for the head. 

 This was a collaboration project that won a West Chester University Educator Award between myself, the preschool classrooms, and our Wildlife Resource Management program. My students helped to teach about growing plants and then we actually went down to our small garden to plant lettuce, carrot, and broccoli seeds. The students really enjoyed digging in the dirt, planting their own seeds, and taking care of their crops on a daily basis. Each day we would go down to our garden and water the plants. The children were fascinated to see their end results! They even got to taste the vegetables that they grew.


A student created a lesson plan to go with the story book, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." They made the caterpillar head and cut the mouth open so that the children were able to place the food that the caterpillar ate from the story into the caterpillars mouth.  The students had a lot of fun trying to identify the food that the caterpillar ate on each day. It is a good hand-eye coordination activity for the preschool children.

 Here the students are learning about dinosaurs. They were trying to measure how far they could throw the pterodactyl dinosaur. They flew the dinosaur and put tape where it landed. Then they determined who flew the dinosaur the farthest.

Food groups is a fun way to help the students gain more knowledge and experience with new, healthy food. In this particular food group, we were teaching our autistic support class about farm animals in which the cheese and fruit were cut into different farm animals. They were able to touch new textures and explore different tastes. Most of the students had no problem eating the introduced food however; there are some students with sensory issues. It is a big accomplishment to simply get them to touch the food!

This turkey activity was a game that my high school students created. It follows the rules of "pin the tale on the donkey" instead it is "pin the feather on the turkey." Each preschool classroom came into my classroom and the high school students ran the game. We had the preschool children sitting in sits as they waited for their turn. When a child came up they were to close their eyes, take the feather, and move toward the door where the turkey was. Each child had a blast sticking on the feather in silly places! This activity could be done in any season, "pin the snowflake on the snowman," "pin the hearts on the smiley face," and many more.

Before the Thanksgiving break, the preschool students were also asked to make a textured turkey. The high school students helped them glue all types of materials to their turkey. The feeling of different materials like sand, buttons, shaving cream and glue together, is an activity that allows the children to explore their sense of touch.