Magna-Tiles In My Classroom! Promoting Creativity and Thinking Skills!
Some of you may know that I am a Special Education Teacher for grades TK-1. Many of my students suffer from many different types of learning disabilities. It can be visual recognition skills, phonological awareness skills, etc.
One thing that my students do not struggle with is creativity. A favorite toy of my class is called Magna-Tiles. Anytime, that they are able to choose a toy to use. A majority of my students are clamoring over the Magna-Tiles. I only wish I had more of them to go around! If there is something they want to build and they are unsure of how to. They know various different ways to find tutorials and other help to reach their goals.
The Ball
The Castle
The second is a basic castle. They have created many houses and castles on their own. However, this is another one that my students decided to look up and follow directions in creating. It definitely is not there favorite. They do enjoy it as it is something that they learned!
The Dog
The dog. Oh, what can I saw about the dog? This is by far the current favorite of my class. Every one of my students is a huge animal lover! Dogs, cats, elephants, hamsters and snakes. They love them all! When the learned that they could build a dog using the Magna-tiles they all dove right in attempting to figure out how to make it on their own. Now that they know how. It gets built by at least three students a day. I'm sure they will lose interest in it soon enough and find a different animal to make. Although once the learn to build more animals I may have a magna-tile zoo in my classroom!
The Magna-tiles can be used for a lot of different things in class from teaching shapes and 3D-Shapes to teaching fine motor skills and critical thinking skills. My favorite though is to use them to promote teamwork and creativity!