Today’s entry at #8 in the list of 12 is manipulatives.  They can be fancy commercial manipulatives like counting bears and colored nuts and bolts or they can be clothespins, popsicle sticks, and blocks.  It most likely will be a combination of the two.  I once did a presentation on how to equip a classroom using paper clips, clothespins, index cards, file folders, and popsicle sticks.  The staff I was working with at the time kept telling me they didn’t have curricula material so I set about to show them how they could make them.  At some point I will find those activities and share those pictures here.  For today, though, I just want to make a few points about manipulatives.  

1.  Just like with any materials, the manipulatives you choose for your classroom should be age-appropriate for the students you teach.  So, in a preschool classroom you might count using counting bears.  In a middle school or high school classroom, you may still work on counting, but you would want to do it with coins and paper clips.  You may still work on sorting with older students, but instead of sorting unifix cubes, students would sort silverware.

2.  Popsicle sticks have a variety of uses across the ages.  You can write on them.  The picture above has social questions written on them for a middle school student.  Students played a game where they took turns pulling a a stick out and completing or asking the question to other players.  In other uses, younger students can sort them by color or you could write sight words on them and have them match them to pictures.  They are terrific for students working on basic put-in tasks, and they can be used with Velcro to make sentence and visual support strips.

3.  Clothespins are another really useful manipulative across the ages.  Again, you can write on them and have the students match them to sight words on index cards.  Students working on basic skills of putting in can work on motor strength of putting them in a container.  Of course you can also use them to hang clothes to dry.  🙂

Clearly there are lots of other manipulatives out there, but whatever you use they are critical to developing hands-on tasks that provide varied activities to practice and learn skills.   So, what are your favorite manipulatives in the classroom?