By GERRI MCDONALD
Special to Atmore News
Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes by Eric Litwin is a favorite story for Mrs. Brooke Drinkard’s kindergarten class at Perdido Elementary School. After listening to the story, the children helped create a chart to show their favorite color of shoes.
Hands-on activities in kindergarten include children’s spelling their names by manipulating the letters (with Velcro backs) onto cards. This activity not only helps the children recognize their names in print, but the individual letters and the order they come in. This is just one of many ways the children practice new skills without simply writing their names and letters.
Encouraging young pupils to do things for themselves, which will help them with learning independently later in life, is the underlying benefit of hands-on activities. Important life skills are often neglected when students are simply told facts and made to learn them by heart.
Furthermore, hands-on learning allows students to directly observe and understand what is happening. This is a particularly successful way to teach kinesthetic learners, who learn best by example. It is often hard to properly understand something you have never directly seen or experienced.
