Mr Men School: Learning Directional and Positional Concepts with Mr Nosey

I buy all my Mr Men books from charity shops at between 25p and 50p each, so it is a bit hit and miss which ones I am able to get my hands on.  In this case I owned two Mr Nosy books which I read out to the girls:

By some miracle the Latest Mr Men magazine had a double spread called ‘Getting to know Mr Nosy’ so we went ahead and got to know him!

The book entitled ‘ Mr Nosy and the Big Surprise ‘ was perfect for introducing the concepts of direction and position to my girls.  Mr Nosy, in his usual nosy way, sees a door and is so curious as to where it leads he opens it and enters through.  The story is about him following the trail to a place he has built up in his mind to be really exciting, only to find to his disappointment it leads to a white room with absolutely nothing in it.  I thought I would take the girls on a journey of their own using the directions and positions I wanted them to master (for example up/down, over/under, in/out, stop/go and left/right).

A5 pointed out that each pair were opposites.  We had done lots of work on opposites when we spent a week with Little Miss Neat and I was pleased she remembered.  She asked to do a few work pages on opposites.  Each Mr Men magazine has a double page focusing on two Mr Men or Little Misses who are opposite to each other.  For example Little Miss Neat and Mr Messy, or Mr Good and Little Miss Bad.  Of course I said yes:

Using their Thomas the Tank Engine toys T built a track on top of the table making sure he included an up and down (bridge), stop and go (traffic lights), left and right (cross roads) and so forth:

I made a Mr Men vehicle which was a cut out from their magazine and each chose the Mr Men toy they wanted to drive:

We had a quick lesson using the cut our Mr Nosy, where I used him to demonstrate what each word meant.  Next A5 took her ‘car’ with Miss Hugs (new character)  in and attempted to follow my instructions around the track I had made up earlier on in the day:

Each day we repeated the same activity with a different track.  Sometimes I lay things across the track and I asked them what they should do (I was looking for ‘go around’ or ‘go over’).  This was such an easy and simple activity to set up and it worked wonders at consolidating lefts and rights  etc

Next we played ‘Mr Nosy says…. again using the set of concepts I shared above.  We took it in turns sometimes the girls were Mr nosy, other times it was me.

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