Velcro Carpet Dots
My kindergarten neighbor teacher had these incredible velcro dots on her floor for the alphabet, numbers, and for students to line up on and when I first saw them I knew I needed some. These are great for so many things and it’s nice to be able to decorate the carpet with something for an easy and simple look. Sometimes I feel like adding another poster on the wall can be too much but these are great since they simply attach to your carpet- and yes they super stick to your carpet. As always I found these bad boys on Amazon. Here are the ways I have seen them used:
Lining Up
I have seen these work wonders in my Mom’s classroom for lining up. The younger kids tends to argue or get way too close to each other because they are still learning about personal space. If you are having issues with students arguing about someone cutting or being too close to others these are great. It allows students to know exactly where their spot is and miraculously makes any argument invalid. They seem to not even think about it anymore once these are on the ground and just go to their spot.
Kinesthetics
Kinesthetic learning is huge today when it comes to lesson planning. I use my dots for kinesthetics a lot when I notice a student needs a break. As you can see from the picture above I have them scrambled on the carpet in front of my reading area. When I see a student needs a break I will tell them to go find a letter and come back. This allows for the student to get up and move around. They also may just need a minute or two of a break to help them refocus. My students love this and it’s a way for them to feel like they aren’t in trouble. A lot of the time when we have kiddos that are struggling with focus it is hard for both the teacher and student to find a way to get a break in without feeling like we are getting them in trouble. This allows them to move and have fun.
Games
I have been trying to incorporate quick games at the end of my lesson with my students to add more fun to our day and an opportunity for them to work on their alphabet. What I will do is call out a letter and have the student find it and stand on it. They then have to tell me the letter and sound. As I’m typing, I actually just realized I could make this even more challenging by having them come up with 2-3 words that have that letter in a word and have to write it down on a clipboard. This is a great activity to do and pull students one at a time to test them one-on-one and yet have everyone else working and learning.
As you can see these velcro dots can be used for a bunch of things and I am sure many more that I haven’t even heard of yet. It can help you manage your classroom or create a fun brain break during the day. Either way I hope you can use these simple and easy tool in your classroom.
Happy Teaching :)