For the past few weeks, I have been busy organizing things for the summer program at Hope's Home, the daycare I work at.  The program is for school-age children with exceptionalities and/or diverse medical needs and their siblings.  One type of activity that we will be doing a lot of is what's called sensory play.  
Sensory play has a lot of benefits for young children, and one of the ways that I am going to incorporate sensory play into my curriculum is through felt stories and activities.  Felt has a unique texture to it, you can find it in pretty much every colour imaginable, and it's "I'm-on-a-budget" friendly, which are all characteristics of a great learning aid.  You can easily cut felt into different shapes, sizes, and symbols, and decorate it with fabric paint and craft supplies.  Felt pieces can also represent various characters and items mentioned in a story, and help children connect the dots between the different elements and events in that story.  

Here are a few pictures of the felt stories and activities that I have been working on.  Some of them are cross-curricular in that they incorporate aspects of math (fractions and counting), language arts (letters and words), and health (nutrition.)  I will be adapting several children's books into felt stories this week; if anyone has any other patterns or felt story ideas I would love to hear about them!  



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