February 18, 2012

Classroom Quilt


This week we made a hand quilt to celebrate the letter Q. To make the quilt I traced the children’s hands on paper and I cut them myself, as cutting around a hand with fingers is asking too much for the age group that I have in my preschool. 


Here are the developmental benchmarks for cutting with scissors:
3;6 years old – cuts with scissors following a straight line
4;6 years old – cuts with scissors following a curved line
5;0 years old – cuts a square ad triangle
5:6 year old – cuts picture following general shape - the complexity of the shape has an impact on the ability to cut with precision

If you look at the quilt picture it is easy to figure out how I did it. Yellow hands on blue squares, orange hands on green squares, red poster paper and green, yellow and blue borders.

I assembled the quilt on Thursday afternoon and placed it on the floor so when the children arrived on Friday they were excited to see the quilt. They began looking for their hands based on the size and color they had chosen. A few students asked whom the big hands belonged.  I asked them to read the names and they knew it was either Mrs. Amelia or Mrs. Amen. They quickly figured out that Mrs. Amen had the ‘nnnn’ at the end so the mystery was solved.

One of the words in the Starfall website for the letter Q is quilt and when the students saw the quilt on Starfall they all screamed “it is like ours!”

I helped younger students write their names and I did it in print, as it is easier for them to trace. Some students asked me to trace the name in pencil so they could go over it and some wanted to write their name independently.

We hung our quilt outside the classroom. I think it looks great!

As an added information it is great t have the children ‘cut’ paper with their hands which is basically ripping paper using the correct technique. This is the skill we used when we did our fish. You can see this post by clicking on the link below.

Hope you liked it!

Amelia Mello, M.Ed.

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