Playing in the Kitchen

I do want to point out one of the really cool toys we used when we talked about the kitchen during our Rooms of the House theme-- Measure-Up Pots and Spoons, which are available from Discovery Toys. (I am an Educational Consultant for Discovery Toys for fun on the side. I wouldn't talk about the toys if I didn't believe in their value!!)

Targets
Vocabulary-kitchen, spoons, pots, cooking
Play skills
Pre-math concepts
Articulation- spoon

We put the Pots and Spoons in the kitchen area for the students to play with during their free play time to expose them to the vocabulary items. They had a chance to pretend to cook delicious meals for us! While they cooked, they would typically match the colors (green spoon with green pot, blue spoon with blue pot, etc)--they did this on their own without adult prompts.

They also noticed the size differences, so we were able to practice "big" and "small" or "big, bigger, biggest."
Some of the other fun things to do with the Pots and Spoons are stacking and nesting, as they are fit perfectly! We also could have used them for teaching simple math and number identification, teaching about volume and balance and many other valuable skills.
Talking about all of the spoons also gave us a chance to encourage the use of the "S" sound---if they asked for a "poon," we had a great opportunity to model for them SSSSpoon and have them practice over and over again.