Egg Puzzles

 

I remember seeing a super idea for making egg puzzles, but I cannot remember where? My apologies for not giving the proper credit. 

I added to the idea and created a quick counting activity. It was easy enough to create and Little One liked it. Match up the number of dots to the correct numeral and of course this is aided by the fact that each egg is a puzzle.

The template for the eggs, I found here.

The best was when Little One had packed them out and started counting them. When he got to four he said with great delight and surprise "Only one more to go, then I'm five!" Only one more Little One. Only one more. :)

PS. Sharing at Show-and-Share Saturday at I can teach my child

Fun with Humpty Dumpty

There are a lot of eggs around at the moment - have you noticed ;) - which got me thinking, who's the coolest EGG around? 

Humpty Dumpty of course. 

With that in mind we have been having some Humpty Dumpty fun over here...

 A bottle top Humpty.

Build a wall by matching the number to the dots. 

Little One loved this activity.

Our favourite Book about the famous Egg. 

All the King's horses and all the King's men...

(Peg craft inspired by the amazingly creative lilla a)

Shortbread Soldiers.

(Plain biscuits from Woolworths)

Capital H activity from Making Learning Fun.

Finger Puppet Humptys.

I have plans for these - you will have to wait and see. :)

More Easter fun to come. Till next time.

Christmas Tree Biscuits

A few weeks back Little One brought home a Christmas Tree biscuit from school, similar to this one. I knew we had to try these at home too.

I used a very sharp knife to cut the biscuits (store bought Tennis Biscuits), but they broke very easily. I tell you this, because little people can find this upsetting. A small tip, when they do break, tell your little one that it's a puzzle and you will fix it (or they can) on the plate. Once the icing is poured over, the biscuit is far stronger. My little guy's teacher mentioned that they also spoke about division, halving, triangles and squares...so a nice little maths lesson can be had too :).

Once you have laid out your tree on a plate, the decorating starts...the best part. Oops, I forgot, the eating is the best part :). I'm not a Tennis Biscuit fan, but I even polished off a few of these. Yummy!

Thank you Tracey for the inspiration!

Sharing this at:

Shape Matching Fun

Today's post is a continuation of the Doctor Doctor fun we've been up to here. I love the simplicity of the red medical cross, so today I'm sharing some shape matching fun inspired by it.

Do your children have this kind of shape sorter...or something similar? I made these discs and Little One started off by matching up the plastic shapes to the discs...easy peasy. 

We then put the plastic shapes aside and asked him to find matching discs - for example, 

find another yellow shape or find another hexagon? 

I then packed them out in rows and asked him to count each row.
He did this very nicely :).

We didn't do this, but another possibility would be to put three in a row and ask which is the odd one out or which one doesn't match the others.

After playing with the discs for awhile, I put those aside and we had some fun with the shape sorter. As we played , it struck me that this is such a versatile toy. I have always thought of it as a baby toy, perhaps because my earliest association of it is the Tupperware shape sorter ball (remember that one?). But this is really far more than a simple baby posting game, with many playful and educational possibilities. I might just do a whole post about it sometime...

 Building shape towers...and the best part...knocking them down!

Till next time, Happy playing!

PS. I was really curious about the origin and meaning of the red cross medical symbol. You can read more about it here.

Plastic Egg Birds {Craft and Game}

These little birds were inspired by these that I saw at lets go fly a kite, who in turn had seen them at Busy Bee Kids Crafts.

(What a super website by the way.
Be sure to check it out for some really nice, cute kids' crafts.)

I decided to add a bit of a game to them that would be both educational and fun. I told Little One that the mommy bird is fetching worms for her hungry chicks. Can you see how hungry they are? She comes back with some colourful worms and her little chicks gobble them up. One little chick only eats one and then his tummy is full...another little chick eats two...and so on.

For the nest, I covered a plastic bowl in some green paper and then added the strips. To get your chicks to stand up in the nest, cut a toilet roll into smaller rings and rest the eggs in the rings. It works perfectly.

Till next time...

PS. Linking this to Show and Tell @ ABC and 123

One-to-One Correspondence

Identifying numbers and rote counting are fun to teach our children, but once mastered, it  does not mean that our child understands what the value of each number is. Teaching one-to-one correspondence is a great way to teach them the unit value of a number. I have found the explanations of one-to-one correspondence to sometimes be confusing, so this post is really to clarify it for myself and hopefully for you too.

I thought that I would start with the proper definition and headed on over to Wikipedia.  This is what they had to say: "In mathematics, a bijection, or a bijective function, is a function f from a set X to a set Y with the property that, for every y in Y, there is exactly one x in X such that f(x) = y and no unmapped element exists in either X or Y." Hee hee...You got that, right?

Okay, lets try again. My research led me to a post at A Teacher at Heart and I learned that it is fundamentally the matching of one object to one (corresponding) number or object , for example: matching the number "3" to the three bears;  or "4" to moving four spaces on a board game; matching one knife to one fork; or two socks to two shoes. The key is that the matching is to the same value.

In light of the above information, I realized that when counting with Little One (33 months at the time of this article), it is important to simultaneously touch and count the objects. In practice, this means that I may gently take Little One's hand and touch the objects that we are counting. Children tend to naturally touch objects as they count, but may sometimes skip an object or double count. A very informative article on number skills at down syndrome education online explains that children can be helped to keep track of counting by placing objects already counted in a separate pile or counting in one direction. Increasing the size of spaces between objects and using objects that are not too small to hold or roll also helps the young child in the counting process. (This website is definitely worth checking out if you would like more information about teaching numeracy.)

In an article by Rita Webb at Ezine , she points out that one-to-one correspondence also involves the skill of comparing sets to see which has more or less. She shares a variety of activity ideas to practice both matching and comparing. I won't be writing about the comparing of sets here, but you can head on over to Ezine to see what she has to say.

Earlier this year we did a mini Cats theme and I found some cat counting flashcards at Sparklebox. I wanted to try out a one-to one correspondence activity with Little One (See picture above) and was surprised at how easily he understood what was required. I would say "Can you put one block on one Kitty?" and so on. I'm on the look-out for some more easy one-to-one correspondence activities, so if you have any to share, please leave a link in the comment box.

PS. Our Touch and Count Cubes, seen in the picture above, are a great learning tool.  I highly recommend them for every household. I use them regularly during the homework session with my older son, as they have endless mathematical possibilities. They are available here in South Africa at CNA stores or through agents. Please contact me if you would like more info. 

PPS. Linking this to Show and Tell @ ABC and 123

Baking School

Who would have thought that baking some biscuits could be so much fun and educational at the same time! It's a super sensory experience, uses fine-motor skills, and we added shape and colour recognition, as well as counting into the mix!

Nope, no cookie dough in my mouth Mommy...

PS. I'm linking this to: 

For the Kids Friday @ Sun Scholars  

Tot Tuesdays @ My Delicious Ambiguity 

High Paw @ the best toys for toddlers

Cats {Nursery Rhyme Fun}

 

I recently shared about a terrific book, Origami for children, by Mari and Roshin Ono, so I was very excited to find Origami Club, a fantastic website, with lots and lots of ideas and great instructions. You can print the instructions, or watch a video if the printed version is to tricky to understand. All ideas are also rated, so you know the difficulty level before you start.

As part of our cat theme, I focused on some popular cat nursery rhymes...

 The Three Little Kittens

For some fun related to this nursery rhyme, we traced around Little One's hand and then created three sets of mittens. He loved sticking on the cotton balls. Little One loves glue, and calls it "gloopy glue", like Mr Maker does.  He gave this bottle of glue a good squeeze (great for those little fingers), but in the end I needed to help squeeze the glue out. We then played a game of hide and seek with the mittens. Just like in the nursery rhyme, we "lost" the mittens and had to find them. He really enjoyed this! (The mittens and the kittens are great for counting practice too.)

For some more fun, I made origami puppets (see above) to act out the nursery rhyme and we once again used our mittens as part of the play. I made a happy and a cross face for the Mommy cat, which I stuck back-to-back to a craft stick, so that the face could easily be flipped over during the story. This was also a great success!

Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat, Where have you been?

Acting out this nursery rhyme also turned into a great learning activity, with me focusing on prepositions. In my version, the pussy cat frightened and chased the mouse under, over, and onto the chair.  

PS. I'm linking this to...

Tot Tuesdays @ My Delicious Ambiguity 

Show and Tell @ ABC and 123 

High Paw @ the best toys for toddlers

For the Kids Friday @ Sun Scholars
We Play @ childhood101 

Colour Fun #9 - Buckets of Colour

Do you know that your child will remember anything that is correctly associated, anything outstanding, and anything that is appropriately repeated. This wonderful information is from Tony Buzan's book, Brain Child, one of my all time favourite parenting books. Tony Buzan calls a baby's brain, "a gigantic association machine". Another great bit of information to know about, is that memory is enhanced by the more senses that are involved.

Now the idea behind buckets of colour, was to create a fun memory and association with each colour represented.  I prepared all the buckets ahead of time and included items such as balloons, play dough, finger paint, bubbles, whistles, threading toys, plastic animals, stickers, bean bags and sweeties. Originally the plan was to have only small things in each bucket, so that I could close the bucket and take it along anywhere if I wanted to. Truthfully though, I added bigger things, like a flute and real fruit, which obviously didn't fit into the buckets.

I must say that these buckets became so much more than just colour fun. There was counting (3 little green frogs); numeracy (cutting the play food in half); imaginative play (play dough snakes eating the play food); fine motor skills (using the stickers and threading); body parts (sticking the stickers on body parts); gross motor activities with balloon and bean bag fun; sensory play (painting, smelling play dough, eating ice cream); language enrichment ("lets decorate our bucket with the stickers"); and, identifying shapes. For the colour "green", for example, we took our green bucket outside and had a "green" picnic on the grass. We sat on our green picnic blanket, ate a green apple and played with our green toys!

 

For lots more colour activities, pop on over to My Delicious Ambiguity, a wonderful blog with lots of tot activities. Jenn has a whole collection of colour activities posted here.

PS. I'm linking this to Tot Tuesdays and Show and Tell.

Colour Fun #3 - Colour Foam Fish

 
If you have been following this little series so far, you will recall me mentioning playing "Red Fish, Red Fish" with Little One in the bath. I was introduced to the idea of using craft foam as a bath toy by my friend Grietjie, over at Joyful Mama's Place, so I decided to make some fish for Little One and what a hit!

Now these little fish, or "fishies" as we refer to them, are wonderful for teaching more than just colours. They are also great for counting practice and learning body parts. Little One loves it when I stick a fish somewhere on his body. I get really animated and say something like, "Here comes the fishie, he's going to sit on your....tummy, ankle, chest! Little One now pre-empts me and calls out a body part before I can...too cute!

As far as counting is concerned, Little One has been counting to 10 for a few months now, but I realize this is simply rote memory. To understand the concept of "1" is an entirely different story.  So when we count the fish, I place his hand or finger on each fish as he counts them...a good start to real counting.

To make the fish, you need to purchase some craft foam available from most craft stores or stationers. Make yourself a template out of cardboard and use this to trace your fish directly onto the craft foam with  a pen or pencil. Then simply cut out. I often use puzzle pieces, cookie cutters, even flat toys, like the threading fish seen here, as a template and trace around it.

The craft foam sticks very nicely to the sides of the bath or tiles when wet. In fact, if you leave them there, they will more than likely still be stuck on by the next bath time. If they crease (when little one's scrunch them), they are easily straightened when they are laid flat again. And the last most important instruction, "Have Fun!"