Countdown to Kindergarten shares the tale of little girl that is made to worry about kindergarten by some rules shared with her by a first grader. The first grade tells her that she can’t bring her stuffed bear to school. She isn’t allowed to bring her cat either. Finally she is told she has to know how to tie her shoes.
She has already mastered so many things. She can count backwards from 10!
The little girl tries to hide her shoes so her mom will have to buy shoes with velcro. She takes out her shoelaces. She sits with her dad and really tries to learn to tie her shoes. She tries all kinds of things with her shoes. She is so worried she will get in trouble!
When she gets to school she finds out the first grader was all wrong. There is a day that she can bring in her stuffed animals. There is a time to work on tying shoes with the teachers help. The little girl is so relieved that she won’t get in trouble. Her teacher makes her day.
What did we do to explore Countdown to Kindergarten?
Shoe Lacing Number Facts
Cardboard shoes made from an old pizza box were created to work on addition facts. Math facts were placed on the left side of each shoe and the answers to the facts were placed right. Shoelace holes were placed below each number fact. Two additional holes were punched at the bottom of each column to act as a starting place for lacing through the facts.
The laces go right to left and back again. Sometimes the lace will go from the number sentence to the sum and sometimes it goes sum to number sentence.
Uppercase to Lowercase Letter Lacing
Some uppercase letters look just like their lowercase letters. Some letters look different. I used some cardboard from the same pizza box to make a lacing activity that allowed JDaniel to work on matching some tricky letters.
Shoelace Painting
A shoelace was dipped into the paint with coffee stirrers created a fun painting tool. Once the shoelace was coated with paint, it was placed on one side of a piece of black construction. When the shoelace was arranged the way we decided we liked it, We closed the other side of the construction paper over the shoelaces.
The outside of the paper was rubbed all over to press the top piece of the paper to create a symmetrical print of the shoelace. When we opened up the paper and lifted off of the lace, we were left with a really pretty print.
It looks a little ghostly! We think it looks really cool.
Love, love, love the shoe lacing number facts! My 2nd grader still wants to wear velcro instead of tying his shoes. We have compromised by alternating days between velcro and lace up shoes.
I love this book and the shoe lace activities are adorable! You can use those cut outs for shoe tying practice, too!! –Lisa
I love the crafts done with this! Shoe lace math and upper and lower case letter. What an awesome way to really get into the book! Thanks for sharing.
That actually happened to me! Some kids on the bus would tell us that 1st grade was soooo scary! And you know what? It kinda was but it makes me laugh now that I’m in my early 30’s because I have encountered many scarier things since. I love the shoe laces project.
That lacing activity is really neat!
I bought my daughter this book to get her ready for kindergarten and she really enjoyed it. I LOVE the crafts you came up with to go with this book!
I love your shoelace activities!
Love the lacing activity! And I thought the painting looked rather spooky too! Thanks for sharing with us every week, Deirdre!
I love this shoelace activity!! I will be doing this with my youngest. Thanks for sharing
What a creative story for a kids’ book! LOVE it!
Ooh, I love that shoe lacing activity! My daughter would love doing the letter match one. 🙂 Thank you for sharing at our Pinning for Play link party!
The shoe lacing is fantastic, what an amazing idea. xx
kids are very cute so we care about them.
kids Kindergarten
Funny – I expected that you had a shoe lacing practice session. My daughter is in second grade and still doesn’t know how to tie her shoes due to the power of Velcro 🙂
Sounds like a fun book, one that I will be adding to my review list. Thanks
Love the shoelace idea. Must get this book.
Love all the activities using shoelaces!
This was one of our favorite going to school books.
Pinned this!
What great activities!! Thank you for sharing at Sharing Saturday!!
I love this – math with lacing. I never would have thought of it – thanks for sharing at After School!
Love this idea! Thanks for sharing on the After School Linky! Am featuring this post this week!
Love this idea! Thanks for sharing on the After School Linky! Am featuring this post this week!
This is SUCH a great idea. I love that so many skills could be practiced with those lacing “shoes.” I’m featuring this on my blog tomorrow for the After School Linky. Stop by to check it out and keep sharing!