Learning about Place Value

Erik has been struggling to grasp the concept of place value, so we've been trying to find ways to make it more understandable. His school was doing a coin-wars fundraiser, so we pulled out our coin  jar and I set him to work counting sorting them out. 

We counted each kind of coin separately from the rest, starting with the smallest pile. He'd take a pile of coins (let's say dimes, for example) and sort them into piles of 10. Once we had all our piles of ten we counted how many piles and wrote the number on a white board. I pointed out that there was only enough room for us to write one digit in the space, so we had to figure out how to regroup the coins and write them digits in the correct space.
We did this same process with each of the different types of coins. I think by the time we were done he had a much better understanding of place value, though he still doesn't quite have it mastered. We'll keep working on it, but we're almost there.

Balloon Free Play

 We LOVE balloons at our house. They are so cheap and provide so much entertainment! I almost always have a package of balloons tucked away somewhere so that when we're desperate for something to do I can pull them out.

 This day both kids were bored and cranky and just kept getting into trouble. I've learned that if I can provide them with something to keep themselves busy and cheer them up it can change a BAD day into a good one. And this pack of balloons only cost me a dollar, so it's a winner all around.

 We built muscles while we threw and caught and batted and kicked the balloons.

 We built vocabulary as we talked about colors and sizes.

 We built a foundation for learning math by comparing and classifying.

 We built memories as we goofed around and enjoyed being together.

 I pulled out a marker and drew a face on one of the balloons. This idea took off like wildfire, and soon every balloon had a different face on it. The kids would bring me a balloon and I'd let them pick whether that one would be happy, sad, surprised, etc.

 To see more of the fun things we've done with balloons, click here.

MORE Ways to Keep a Toddler (and a Preschooler) Busy on a Road Trip

Several months ago we went on a big road trip that lasted almost two full weeks. This was the first major road trip we'd gone on since adding a second kid to the mix. I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to maintain my sanity while keeping the two of them entertained, it had been hard enough with just one!

I knew I already had a good collection of ideas from our experience with Erik, in fact this post I did about our major road trip with him has been one of my most popular. That post really sums up a lot of what we did on this trip, so I do recommend you check it out as well. Even though all the old ideas are still good, I knew we were going to want some new things in the mix to keep the kids interested. I spent a fair amount of time searching for ideas and assembling supplies, but it was totally worth it. Here are all the activities I came up with, hopefully you'll find something in here that might work for you too. I put each one in its own zip top bag and put everything in a backpack so I could keep it handy and organized. 

And here is more information about everything we did. Links take you to the sites that inspired us, or to amazon.com. 

***Coloring books, colored pencils, and a pencil sharpener. I purchased a new coloring book for each kid so that they would be new and exciting. I chose to pack colored pencils instead of crayons because in warm weather crayons may melt all over the inside of your car, and because Sharli eats crayons.  

*** Glow in the dark bracelets and cheapo flashlights for keeping the kids busy after dark. 

*** Books! I bought a new book for each kid. Having something new and exciting makes such a huge difference. We also packed a big bag of our favorite books from our own shelves. Erik is getting big enough that he can follow a story without needing pictures to be entertained, so we checked out Mr. Popper's Penguins from our library and read that aloud as we drove. That was a fun one for us adults too, definitely one I'd recommend!

***An I Spy bottle. I somehow didn't get a picture of the kids playing with this one. It wasn't a huge hit, but it did keep them busy for a few minutes here and there.  

***Magnet Discovery Bottle. This one wasn't much of a hit with my kids. I think we ended up throwing it away part way through the trip because it was taking up room and nobody wanted to play with it. Who knows though, maybe your kids would love it. 

***Pipe cleaners. These were to be used on their own to play with, as well as to be used in our Pipe Cleaner Drop and to make Pipe Cleaner Shapes, both of which are outlined here. For the Pipe Cleaner Drop I ended up wishing I'd used one of those little snack size Pringles cans, since the full size one was kind of unwieldy for Sharli. Plus, the smaller things are the less room they take up in the car. I also remembered too late that we learned with Erik that sticks work better than pipe cleaners for this one.  

*** Sticky Sticks (and matching game). These have been one of the most favorite things we made for this trip. Months later they still get played with a lot. This one is so easy to make. You just attach velcro dots to craft sticks and you're done. If you want to make the matching game then you cut shapes out of paper and write the name of the shape on them. Even if your child isn't reading yet, there is still great value in giving them chances to become aware of print in the world around them.

***Open and Close Activity This one was pretty easy to put together. I looked around the house and the dollar store for small containers that I thought little hands could open and close and put them all in a bag together. It turned out that some of them were pretty difficult for Sharli to open, so I incentivized the work she'd have to do to open them by putting fruit snacks inside. 

***Button Snake. This was an activity I had intended to be more for Sharli, but Erik loved it! He begs to play with it at least once a week. I somehow failed to get any pictures of this one, but the link above has all the info.
***Pom Pom Magnets. These were super easy to make. I just picked up some thin magnets from the craft aisle and hot glued pom poms to them. The magnets I found were in little strips, so I glued a whole line of pom poms on with my hot glue gun (the adhesive already on the magnets wasn't enough to do the job) and then just snipped in between the pom poms with scissors. Throw in a cheap cookie sheet (I got mine for just under $1) and you have a great magnet board, as well as a hard surface for you kid to set on their lap for all the other activities as well. Both kids really enjoyed these magnets. Erik pretended they were cars driving around, or made pictures with them. Sharli mostly just enjoyed dumping them onto the tray and then putting them back in the bag. 

***Lacing Cards. We've made these before for Erik to play with, but that was a long time ago. They were a hit then and they are now too.

***Clip Sticks Counters. Erik might have liked these better if he weren't too distracted by all the other stuff in the activity bag. They were easy to make, all you need are some craft sticks (which is handy, since you'll want some for the Sticky Sticks too), some circle stickers, and a few clothes pins.

***Ping Pong Ball Puzzles. I thought this was a pretty clever idea. You can make an infinite number of puzzles, and increase the difficulty by increasing the number of balls so it's an idea that can grow with your child. Pick up a cheap package of ping pong balls, salvage an egg carton from your recycling and you're ready to go. 

One thing I talked about in my first Road Trip post was the power of snacks. If all else fails just throw some food to your kids and that should keep them quiet for at least a few minutes. Two snack ideas that made a re-appearance from our last road trip were edible jewelry and Surprise Snack Mix. Check out this post for more details. 

And because I'm super nice, I've been working on figuring out the perfect mixture for the snack mix so you all don't make the same mistakes we have. I learned last time that there are some snacks that don't play nice with the others. Our problem snack this time around was the frosted circus animal cookies. They did great until the car got too hot and the frosting melted. Then everything stuck together and got really messy and difficult to eat. Oh well, maybe next time it will be better. Our mix this time included the Circus Animal Cookies, fruit snacks, M&M's, and Goldfish crackers (except ours were the cheap brand so they were penguins instead of fish). I tried to include a mix of textures and flavors to keep things interesting.

I think that about covers it. Now that we've got a third little one in our home I'll have to let you know how things go next time we go on a major trip, but for now this should be enough to go on. Have a good trip!


*Diedre Mower is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. This post contains affiliate links.

Egg Counting Mats

For our letter E math activity we made some cute counting mats that we found here. She has a free printable version of this for those of you who have a printer, or you can do like I did and just trace it onto a piece of paper. 

Erik had fun with this and it was a great addition to our box of activities that Erik can do on his own when I need him occupied for a while without my supervision. 

Deal A Story

This is another activity given to us by my amazing mother-in-law. It is very simple to put together, and the odds are good that you already have what you need right in your home. 

Let's gather our materials:

Playing cards with numbers on them (regular face cards, UNO cards, Rook cards, Skip-Bo Cards, whatever you have)

That's it! Piece of cake, right? No prep, although this is a game that requires your participation. 

 So how do we play?

Deal two or three cards facedown to each player. Choose a child to turn over a card and name the number on it. Use the number as you begin telling a story. Then continue, each turning over a card and saying it's number to incorporate into the story. For example: (child turns over a ten) "Ten little rabbits went to town." (child turns over a two) "They went to two houses looking for food." (next card is a five) "At the second house they met five kind children." (next card is a seven) "The children gave them seven carrots." Continue the story using the number cards. Older children can take turns being the storyteller, adding to the story on their turn.

*Diedre Mower is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. This post contains affiliate links.

Counting Caterpillars

This adorable little math activity came to us by way of my mother-in-law, who is amazing. Included in the little zip-top baggie was a set of instructions, three felt leaves, and a pile of adorable little pipe cleaner caterpillars. Making this busy bag would be pretty easy, here are the supplies you would need:

- A copy of the instructions

-Three leaves cut out of green felt 

-Pipe Cleaners (the puffier they are, the better!)

-Googly eyes

-Glue

 Using wire cutters or scissors, cut your pipe cleaners to approx. 2 inch lengths. Fold the ends over just enough to tuck in the sharp ends. Glue some googly eyes on, and viola!

Erik had a lot of fun with this one. We did a few math questions (pictured above: Which leaf has the most caterpillars), then I let him play with the caterpillars for a few minutes. He named them all after characters in the Clara Caterpillar book we borrowed from the library this week, it was pretty cute. 

I love activities like the that are visually appealing, entertaining, and SO easy to put together!

*Diedre Mower is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. This post contains affiliate links.

Filling up the Letter B

To help introduce the sound the letter B makes, we used this idea from The Measured Mom (she has TONS of alphabet activities, you should check it out!). The first time we did this I handed Erik a bunch of teddy Bear counters and a paper with a large letter B on it. I didn't tell him what to do with it, I just handed it over. He immediately started filling the letter up with bears. We talked about the different colors, we lined them up in a row, we made up little stories about them. At some point I asked him what sound a B makes and made the connection to the bear counters, but I didn't dwell on it. I wanted this to be fun. 

 The next day I put our letter B on a cookie sheet along with another piece of paper with four circles, each colored a different color and labelled with the correct color name. Again, I didn't give any instructions, just turned him loose. He never did sort the buttons by color (he's just not really into sorting things), but he did ask what the words said and we talked about that. He started to outline the B with the buttons, but got distracted just enjoying looking at all the different kinds of buttons. He's asked for this activity several times since this, but due to the choking hazard for Sharli we just haven't had another good opportunity to pull the buttons back out. We will though, don't worry.

Beach Math Flannel Board

This flannel board set is one of many great resources my mother-in-law saved from when her children were young. She has given us use of anything we want out of her many boxes of materials, and we're loving it! 

While I know that most of you don't have access to such a treasure trove, that doesn't mean you can't find a way to do something like this at home. You could make something like our Weather Counting Wall in just about any theme you can dream up and draw. You could use felt and fabric paint to make your own flannel board set. OR, I did the research and found this exact flannel set for sale on this neat website. You're welcome.

We sorted all the different objects (classification) by type and counted how many there were of each. 

We made up little stories about the different children and the things they brought to or saw at the beach, then counted the total number of objects (beginning addition). We made up similar stories for some basic subtraction (Bob saw three fish, but then one swam away. How many are left?)

 Mostly we just played with this and had fun. Erik loves to help make up stories (creative expression) about anything, so we had a lot of fun just imagining what all the felt boys and girls were doing at the beach. Not every story had math involved, but some did.

 My favorite part of this was when my hubby walked in the door for his lunch break and saw the beach scene stuck to the back of our couch (because I don't have a real flannel board to stick these to, but the couch works great). He was SO surprised to see this relic from his childhood sitting in our living room.
The best part? Erik loved this and would happily play with it every day.

Letter A Sorting

An important pre-operational math skill is classifying (aka sorting). Children need to be able to compare items and determine common characteristics to build up to more complex math concepts. I thought that this might be a good way to help Erik cement the difference between lower-case and upper-case A, so we gave it a shot. 

I took all the letter a items I had collected for our sensory bin and put them in a pile on the table. Then I wrote "A" on one paper and "a" on another. 

Despite everything I've read that says little kids come with a love of sorting things, Erik has never been real excited by the idea. He stuck with this for a few minutes, but got bored quickly. That's okay though, the goal wasn't really to get him to sort every single letter a, but to get him engaged with and exposed to the letter. He picked up and manipulated lots of A's, each with it's own size, texture, weight, etc. He was comparing them to each other and really thinking about which was which.

Is It Alive?

I'm not really sure where the obsession came from, but lately Erik has been asking a lot of questions about what it means to be alive or dead. I decided that it was time to talk about what "alive" is and thought that it worked great as part of our letter A theme. I got the idea for today's activity here.

We started by watching this awesome movie about the scientific way to tell if something is alive: 

And if for some reason you don't want to watch Robin Williams, then you can listen to Cookie Monster tell you the same information (in a slightly less funny way) with this video:

After discussing how to know if something is alive or dead, we practiced asking these questions ourselves. 

I took two pieces of paper and wrote "Alive" on one and "Not Alive" on the other. I chose to write "Not Alive" instead of "Dead" because those aren't quite the same thing. Something dead was once alive but is not anymore, while some things never have and never will be alive. I gathered a pile of toys to represent things that belong in both categories so that we could ask the questions mentioned in the videos to figure out how to sort them. 

It was a bit tricky for Erik, because our "alive" things really were just toys representing something living. It's a bit hard to observe things like "Does it eat? Does it breathe? Does it grow?" when all you have to observe are toys.

I ended up looking up pictures of baby animals and mature animals so he could compare and see how they grow. We talked about the noises the animals make to show that they would have to be able to breathe to make any noise. We talked about what kinds of food the animal in question would like to eat. I think he eventually understood what I was getting at, but it took some work. 

 This was a fun science discussion, and also counts as a pre-operational math activity because of the classifying element. Yay for two-in-one activities!

Turkey Clothes Pin Counting

When I found this idea on Pinterest I knew I wanted to make it a part of our Thanksgiving theme. It was super cute and wouldn't be too hard to make, even though I don't have a printer to use the printable included on the original website. I loved how cute this was and that it also includes fine motor practice (which we need a lot of around here) in a math activity.

I know, this isn't the greatest picture ever, but my camera is dying so this is what you get. 

I chose to make my turkeys go through the number 12, since Erik seems to have 1-10 down pretty well, but needs to work on everything higher than that. I figure we can add a few more numbers each time we do a new activity and slowly build up his knowledge base.
I cut my turkeys out of construction paper and used a glue stick to glue the little pieces (beak, wattle, breast) on. Once the glue was dry I numbered each turkey, then laminated them with contact paper.
They are stored in a large zip top baggie and Erik can pull them out to play with them any time he wants.

Weather Counting Wall

This activity may be one of my favorite that we did during our Weather Theme. It took a bit of work to get it ready to go, but it got a lot of use and is something that I can save (most of it anyways) for future use. I took the idea of the Sticky Wall that we've done several times in the past, combined with this idea from Pinterest, and adapted it to fit our theme. 

I cut out LOTS of little shapes out of foam sheets. I wanted to practice one-to-one correspondence (meaning a child has the ability to match ONE object to ONE corresponding number or object), so I cut out the shapes in sets:

1 Rainbow

2 Windsocks

3 Lightning Bolts

4 Windmills

5 Snowflakes

6 Puddles

7 Suns

8 Clouds

9 Hailstones

10 Raindrops

 Next, and this is the tricky part, I took a sheet of contact paper and on the back (NOT sticky) side I wrote the number of objects in each set, a word or two to label the objects in the set, and then traced the outline of the corresponding foam pieces. Why is that so tricky? Well, you have to do it all backwards as it will be reversed when you turn it sticky side out to hang on the wall. You may notice in these pictures that I made a spelling error, and chose not to redo the entire thing just to fix a word that Erik can't read yet anyways. It's really hard to spell correctly when you're doing it all backwards!

 Next, you remove the backing off of the contact paper and hang it sticky side out on a wall or window low enough to be comfortable for your little one. Give them the foam pieces, and turn them loose! The first few times I sat by Erik and we sorted and counted together, but after that I let him do it on his own. He would choose to come back to this (with no prompting from me) at least once a day for the two weeks we had this hung up, which means it was something he really enjoyed (I'll be honest, that kinda surprised me, I thought I'd have to encourage him to spend time counting the shapes, but he loved it!)

The stickiness of the contact paper eventually wore off (or more likely got covered by dirt and grime) so that part of this activity just went in the trash when we were done with it, but I'll save the counters for future use.