Is It A Tool Or A Toy?



Hey Kinder Friends,

I have to admit with a holiday right around the corner I have been thinking about toys a lot. Toys just seem to conjure up childhood memories and remind me of having fun. And in Kindergarten it is no different but maybe with a little twist. We usually start our Science year off with discussing Science tools and safety and naturally we include some discussion on tools and toys in the classroom and their uses along with safety. I love the beginning of Science in Kindergarten because it is in the early days that we are busy with exploration and learning expectations. Shopping for holiday items and seeing toys it made me start to think about how fast time flies and soon I would need to begin to think about the first few weeks of Science. I knew that I wanted to use Is It A Tool Or Toy? again this year.



If you are interested in using this in you classroom click on the image above.

This download contains real life images of tools and toys. It has two rounds of slides. One set is without the discussion question and the other set contains the discussion question on the slide. The PowerPoint was created to aid in Science Tools or Toys discussions and to help facilitate communicating like Scientists. The file is editable to some degree to allow for personal customization of probing questions, adding or deleting slides or creating more rounds if needed. The culminating activity is a notebooking prompt writing page. This is truly Science Fun Ready To And On The Run!

 

How is it used I the classroom? I use this to help in facilitating discussions about tools. What I like about it is that it does facilitate a great discussion about what is a tool or toy and I encourage the students to justify their thinking through the use of sentence stems. I was pretty amazed at the responses and justifications the children shared. We learned that even toys can be used as tools it just depended on how you used the objects. We used the presentation four times during the week and we notebooked about it on the last day. I was able to incorporate several books with this mini study.

 

 

I like the first book because it has age appropriate Science tools the children can relate to and I loved the second book because it was interesting to look at tools that other people use and discuss those tools and their uses and tie in a little safety here too. It's super simple and I love just that and I love not having to hunt and search for good quality pictures of tools and toys because they are all in one place in the download.

 For more Science fun just click on the picture above! Have fun investigating friends!