Monday, April 9, 2018

Creative Do-A-Dot Activities

Why reinvent the wheel, when you can use the same wheel a bazillion ways? I think everyone with a preschooler has seen the Do-A-Dot activities that you can print off for your child on Pinterest, right?  You can get them for free for every letter, number, shape, & season.  I use these all the time, but not just with dot markers.  Let me show you some other ways you can use these activities to expand the number of skills learned.Creative Do A Dot Activities- Life with the HawleysHawley Homeschool
First go to Pinterest and search for "free do a dot activities" (you could also include letters, numbers, or some holiday/season of interest).  Once you print the pages off, you could laminate it or put it in a page protector.  For these I always put them in a page protectors because I know that at some point we are actually going to use them with our dot markers (which is what they are for anyways, right?).  Once the dot pages are in the page protector there are a variety of ways that we use these in our school day.
The first way to use these activities is pretty obvious: dot markers.  But you could also use stickers, either dot stickers or some festive stickers, to fill in the dots. DSC_0044
You could also use dry erase markers on your page protectors for handwriting practice.  When learning how to write, the bigger the better, so dot pages work really well for that.DSC_0050
If you're getting tired of the dots/stickers and you want to change it up a bit you could use something else to cover up the dots: paint with corks, bells at Christmas time, acorns for the letter 'A', rocks for the letter 'R', plastic bears, transparent discs, pennies or coins for St. Patrick's day, M&M's for the letter 'M', fuzzy pom poms, hearts for Valentine's Day, stamps, etc.DSC_0041DSC_0137DSC_0192DSC_0273DSC_0329DSC_0557DSC_0566
Another way to get creative with these sheets is with a dry erase marker, page protector, & a toothbrush (see more ways to use a toothbrush here).DSC_0389DSC_0560
Other times I will fill in the dots with numbers, shapes, or letters before our school day begins.  I will call out something and my kids will find what was called out and put a dot on it.  (e.g. "put a dot/cover on all of the triangles")DSC_0048DSC_0049DSC_0353DSC_0356
Once my kids mastered recognition of letters, I started calling out the phonetic representation, & they would put dots on those letters (e.g. "put a dot/cover on all of the letters that make the bah bah bah sound").DSC_0047
I have also asked Dutch, my 3 year old, to put a dot or a cover over all of the uppercase/lowercase letters I have written in the dots (e.g. put a blue dot on all of the uppercase R's).DSC_0046
To practice fine motor skills, I will also ask my kids to use a utensil of some sort to place a manipulative on top of the dots.DSC_0043
There really are so many ways to use these pages, and I'm so grateful for how much I can get out of them! 
Do you have another way to use these pages that my kids would most likely like to try?
xoxo Darby
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