Gently topple the cups. Act surprised, and say, Oh look, I pushed them over! Set the cups up again, and encourage your baby to touch them, using his hands or feet. Applaud his efforts when the tower tumbles.
What baby learns: Cause and effect tap or push to demolish the tower and hand-eye coordination. How to play: Fill a sink, large bowl, or a bucket with water, or use a tub at bath time. Settle your cutie into your lap, or hold her to keep her safe near water.
Gently toss a waterproof toy into the basin to make it splatter or cause ripples. Let her splash around and make waves or rescue a ducky from the roiling current.
Just be sure to never leave baby alone around water. Sit on the floor next to your baby or toddler, grab the end of the string, and coax the toy toward you.
Hand over the reins. Say pull and help your playmate ease the toy forward. What baby learns: Cause and effect, some vocabulary, and large and small motor skills. View our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The thumbs up icon represents confidence.
For content about raising a confident child, look for this icon. Related Articles and Activities. Stacey Feintuch. Share with your friends. Preschoolers may not be able to grasp the intricacies of human behavior and its effect on the world, but they can begin to understand the basics with a few simple lessons. Once children have a basic grasp on cause and effect, it will be easier to build that knowledge into something more complex.
Bring a few gym balls into the classroom and have children roll them around. Ask you students to identify the cause and effect relationship between pushing a ball and its motion across the floor. Incorporate cause and effect principles into your daily class schedule. For instance, when students line up neatly, they are allowed to go outside to play. Provide nursery rhymes for students to pick out cause and effect scenarios from.
Maybe a familiar story will help them identify the concept. This cause-and-effect lesson plan could be done after kids have mastered the basics. Gather some interesting pictures from classroom magazines Scholastic , Weekly Reader , etc. Look for pictures that have a lot going on in them because kids are going to be looking for several causes and effects, not just one. I would suggest NOT letting the kids search for pictures. Not everything is classroom friendly, and even if it were, it could be a distraction.
Glue the picture to the top of a piece of construction paper portrait format or a piece of chart paper. Kids brainstorm and write down lots of different causes and effects for the same picture by looking at it in many ways. For this activity, find pictures as before, but this time, glue the picture to the center of the paper.
Then kids draw arrows away from the picture and write possible effects. For example, if the picture is of a sunny beach, the cause is the hot sun. Some possible effects might be that the sand is hot, people get sunburned, kids jump in the water to cool off, people sit under umbrellas to stay cool, people put on sunscreen, and so on. The arrows this time point toward the effect and demonstrate causes. For example, if the picture was of spilled milk, the effect is the milk spilled.
The causes might be a cat bumped into it, a baby tried to drink from it, it was too close to the edge of the table, a mom poured too much by mistake, kids were playing ball in the house, and the ball hit it, etc. There are several great picture books, such as If You Swallow a Mouse , that demonstrate cause and effect well. Some of them are a bit outlandish, but kids will enjoy and find memorable the wild scenarios.
Teach upper elementary students that certain words, like because , since , due to , and if … then , or words that help sequence events, like first and then , are signals that can help them find the cause or effect as they read.
Use this handout to help them and then have them practice by making up their own cause-and-effect sentences or by doing a version of the sentence-strips activity outlined above. Games are always a great way to reinforce lessons. As an added bonus, games can be played independently.
When a student or two finishes early or has some free time, have them test their mastery of cause and effect by having them play free online games that will both challenge them and reiterate what you taught. Ice cream lovers in your class? Or, put students in teams and have them test their mettle in this game of cause-and-effect Jeopardy! Perhaps nothing exemplifies cause and effect better than an experiment.
Come up with a list of quick, simple experiments to do, such as putting lots of air in a balloon or putting pennies on the wings of a paper airplane. Then, as a class or in small groups, work together to come up with a simple hypothesis, using the words highlighted above. For example: The plant will grow because we watered it consistently. Or: If we mix the colors yellow and blue , then we will make green. Help students see that the setup of the experiment is the cause and what happens the result is the effect.
Malia is an Associate Editor at WeAreTeachers and loves contributing to this thriving online community. You must be logged in to post a comment.
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