Shapes; Cutting and Sorting

 If you're like me, then you get a mountain of junk mail every week. Piles and piles of it. Normally I just toss it into the recycling, but then I realized that we could get more use out of it first. Here's what we did.

I started by having Erik cut different shapes out of construction paper, then I had Sharli glue them on to a piece of card-stock. We labeled each one, just because I can't seem to not label things. Also print awareness, let's go with that one. :)

 Next we gathered up all the sales papers from the grocery store, but you could also use old magazines. I handed each kid a pair of scissors, and told them to look for shapes.

 As we cut things out we sorted the pictures onto the shapes on our paper. Squares and circles were the easiest to find, but we managed to find one or two triangles, and even a heart shape. The kids had a blast, and spent more than half and hour cutting up all the papers. Even Maren got in on the action, tearing the papers randomly instead of cutting.

 When the kids got bored, we cleaned up the mess and I saved our cutouts and the paper with the shapes so that we can pull them out to play with later.

Color Wheel Sorting

 We've played with a color wheel before, and it was enough fun that when Sharli was trying to learn her colors we decided to give it another try. With 3 kids all joining the fun the papers only lasted an hour or two, but they still had a great time.

 I gather up a basket full of items from around the house and let Sharli match the items to the corresponding piece of paper. Maren just wanted to be sitting in the middle of whatever was going on.

For more ways to have fun with nothing more than a few pieces of construction paper and some masking tape, visit my original post on this activity here.

Pom Pom Sorting

 I was looking for a way to keep Sharli busy for a while and decided to go with one of my old stand-byes. Pom poms are good for SO many things, and most of them require very little prep work on my part.

 This day I grabbed a few small bowls out of the cupboard and set them on a tray with a set of tongs. I picked through the bag of pom poms to find only the ones that matched the colors of the bowls, and put those on the tray as well. I didn't give any instructions, just put the tray in front of Sharli and let her decide how to play with it on her own.

 She fiddled around with color sorting for a little while, and really enjoyed the challenge of using the tongs. 

 It didn't take too long before this turned into a game of "Ice Cream Shop". She would ask me what kind of ice cream I wanted, then scoop up a bowl for me. This kept her busy for as long as I was willing to sit and play along.

I picked these pom poms up for a dollar at Dollar Tree, and we have really gotten our money's worth out of them!

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.

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!

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.

Magnetic Exploration Tray

I found this idea in one of my old Early Childhood Education textbooks and figured it sounded easy to put together, fun, and free, which makes it perfect for us. I gathered a selection of small items from around the house, trying to find a mixture of magnetic and non-magnetic things. I put everything on a tray with Erik's magnet wand and left it on the coffee table for him to discover. 

The round thing near the bottom right-hand corner is a petri dish filled with iron filings and hot glued shut. We found a bottle of iron fillings and the magnet wand at a teacher supply store. 

Erik wasn't sure exactly what to do with all this stuff at first, but it didn't take him too long to figure it out. It was fun to sit and watch him explore the different items to discover which stuck to his wand. 

Metal measuring spoon=magnetic

Plastic baby  spoon=not magnetic

This was a fun way to get Erik interested in some science and exploration of the world around him. Plus it was free and you can't beat that!

*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.

Nativity Matching Game

This post contains affiliate links.

Last Christmas Erik was given an adorable Fisher Price Nativity set that is perfect for babies/toddlers. I just love it! I want the real reason behind Christmas to be as important to my children as it is to me, and this is a great way to really help a child learn to love the story of Christ's birth. 

 As I was looking for a solution to our Christmas tree dilemma, I found a set of wall stickers that make up a Nativity scene. I was so excited. I pulled them out and with a little bit of help Erik got to stick them up on the pantry door (okay, a lot of help, he wanted to stick them all in a pile so I came back later and rearranged the stickers so he could see them all). We've been talking about all the different characters trying to help him recognize them, and today we made a game out of it. We brought his Little People nativity over to the wall Nativity and started trying to match the 3D figures with the stickers. He loved it. Matching the toy in his hand with a picture or video of the same thing is one of his favorite things to do. We kept this up for a while until I made the mistake of trying to get him to match up the stars. As soon as he discovered how to make the one on the stable light up, that was it. All he wanted to do was sit and push the button over and over and listen to the song play. Oh well.

This was a really fun, festive way to help Erik practice sorting/matching skills, fine motor skills, and language development (we talked lots about the names of the kinds of animals, etc...). 

*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. 

Egg Carton Craziness

It's funny to me that despite my attempts to plan fun new things for Erik, so many of the things I post here are the result of desperation. Things like letting Erik help with housework or cook with me are really just desperate attempts to get him out from under foot and occupied while I do whatever I need to do (luckily these activities also really good for him).
Today's activity is no different. I was trying to cook dinner and Erik was hanging on me crying and begging for some attention. I had just used the last egg in my egg carton and hoping to get him off my back for a moment I handed it to him. Then, I realized that we could make this into something much more fun with almost no extra effort on my part. I took him and the egg carton over to the toy box and we dug through until we'd found a whole pile of toys that were little enough to fit inside. I showed him how to put them in and open/close the lid and he was hooked. It was awesome! The next morning, I pulled out some pom poms I had lying around and gave him those to put in the carton. He loved it!
This activity has great learning potential. In addition to working on the vocabulary words "open" and "closed", he also practiced hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills as he dumped the toys out and put them back in. He played with that egg carton for several days until he'd completely destroyed it, and then we had to throw it away. By the time I have another one empty for him it'll be like a whole new adventure again.

Where did they go?

Erik's 1st Sensory Bin

I've wanted to make a sensory bin for Erik for a while now, but I've been waiting for him to be less interested in putting everything in his mouth. He does pretty good with that these days, and while I still have to keep a close eye on him, he will listen when I tell him not to eat something. 

So, don't know what a sensory bin is? Here you go:

 A sensory bin is a container filled with small objects that the child can manipulate and play in. You fill them with just about anything. Water, sand, beans, pasta, pom poms, rocks, water beads, regular beads, rice, etc... We used pinto beans and macaroni noodles (this time they were raw, but they don't have to be). Give the child a variety of containers to play with and just turn them loose. It's nice when your containers are made of different types of materials (glass, metal, plastic), so that when the child puts the beans in it will make different sounds.

We started by spreading a sheet on the floor so that clean up would be really easy, but if you have hard floors you could just sweep everything up afterwords. I filled up a cake pan with the beans and macaroni, gave Erik his different cups and containers, and turned him loose. He loved it! He hasn't really figured out how to scoop up the beans, but he enjoyed dropping them by the handful into the different containers.

 One of the containers I gave him was an empty plastic water bottle. He thought it was great to poke a few beans or noodles into the bottle and then give them a good shake. It made a great noise, and he thought it was awesome!

We've done this activity more than once now, and each time it's been a huge hit! This activity is great for fine motor development, sensory exploration, spatial relations as the child pours or scoops the materials from container to container, and could even be used as a classification exercise for an older child if you sorted the different materials into different containers. Most of all it's just lots of fun!

Pom Pom Playtime

This post contains affiliate links.

I bought a whole bag of pom poms for our pom pom stuffing toy, and decided to do something with the rest of them. I found this idea, and thought it looked like fun, so here we go. 

Let's gather our supplies:

-Pom poms

-Muffin pan

We dumped out the whole bag of pom poms into a muffin tin, and I sorted them by color while saying the color names. Erik doesn't really understand the color part yet, but he's got to start somewhere. After that, I just sat back and let him do whatever he wanted with the pom poms (other than eating them). He carried handfuls of them around the living room, put them inside any opening he could find to poke them into, and just had a ball. They do end up all over the place, but it wasn't too hard to pick them back up. Erik even got involved and thought it was fun to put them back in their baggie. 

We've done this activity more than once now, and he still loves it. One time, when I needed him out from under foot while I was cooking, I gave him the pom poms and a few pots, bowls, cups, etc and let him "cook" too. He thought it was great. He was right by me without being in the way, and he got to be doing the same thing as me (or close enough for him anyway). One tip for making cleanup easier: if the room is already clean than it's much easier to find all the pom poms, unlike when there are toys and things for them to get mixed up with and hidden by. Also, these could potentially be a choking hazard so be smart and watch your little one closely. 

This was a great activity for Erik to practice his fine motor skills. He had to use a pincer grasp to pick up the smallest ones, and he will often hold one or two in his hand while picking up more with the same hand. That takes some coordination and practice! Eventually, as he gets a little older, the sorting part of this activity will play a bigger role. We can use this for learning colors or sizes. 

*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.