Left, Right, Up, Down:
Grades K-3
Overview: Work on spacial and direction skills with familiar surroundings – their own home.
Teacher Preparation: Have parents draw a quick floor plan of their house. It doesn’t need to be to scale, as long as it shows the approximate relationship of the rooms and how they connect.
Procedure Ideas:
* Have students describe their home, starting with walking in the front door.
* If they don’t know left and right yet, they can motion one way or the other to indicate how to move throughout the house.
* Putting floor plans on the overhead projector and pointing the way through the house will help other students see where they are in the “tour”.
* Repeat the exercise every month or two, gradually introducing left and right into their vocabulary.
* Other variations would include descriptions of specific rooms, such as where in their own rooms they have closets, lights, windows, drawers for clothes and boxes for toys.