LEGO tip of the day!

My son is rebuilding his LEGO Tower Bridge and it reminded me of how useful this tip has been in our lives, so I thought I would share it with you (though I'm guessing I have before). This chip and dip tray I got from a Target bin years ago has been so incredibly useful to us over the years! Save your sanity by keeping all of the pieces sorted while building a set. This is particularly useful when building a large set that might take days to complete.

We use this tray for fine motor sorting as well. Do you have any LEGO tips that have made your life easier? I will try to share some more of ours as well over the next few weeks. Find other LEGO ideas here.

memory noun game

After playing with the noun cards I printed out last week, the kids wanted to sort them again, but as they were sorting them I thought we could instead use them to play a game. I grabbed a couple of the wooden cubes in my craft stash (the same used in color resemblance sorting) and some stickers I had from a yard sale. H and F made their own dice with the stickers, and then I put a different colored sticker on each of the noun categories. We turned all the noun cards face down, and then they took turns rolling their die and turning over two cards at a time trying to match the category. When they found a match, they placed it in their pile. Great for learning about nouns as well as for memory.

Color coded noun categories.

Noun game die.

Game setup.

noun sorting

We have been talking about nouns for a few days and so I searched for some person, place, and thing printables to make a sorting game.

Two sets good for pre-readers are here and here; there are both pictures and words on the cards (I printed 4 sheets per page since there are so many pages).

Montessori for Everyone has a great printable with words only, excellent for those kids that have already started reading. They are also grouped so that the person, place, and thing all relate to each other (astronaut, outer space, space shuttle).

Print these out on card stock and let the sorting begin!

rock hunt

This is one of our favorite outdoor activities. H&F don't like going on walks without a purpose, and although I'd love to just walk for the sake of walking, giving them a task to focus on while we're walking seems to help them enjoy the walk quite a bit more than they would otherwise.

What you need:

• basket or beach pail 
• a safe place to walk (I also like to bring the wagon, in case pails get too heavy or little feet get too tired!)

That's it!

We like to save our rocks and bring them inside, weigh them, wash them in a basin and then build with them, sort them by size, or paint them.

Rock hunting in the neighborhood!

Weighing in.

Rinsing and scrubbing. Good skills to master!

F paints. We added stick on googly eyes after they dried.

H paints! You can also warm the rocks in the oven and use crayons to color them.

Loot from a previous rock hunt. Great for sorting.

We picked up a few more rocks at a local park recently. Some great finds!

I may have to find a few more good sized, flat rocks. After seeing these on pinterest, I really want some for my garden!

How cute are these?!

telling time introduction

H has been able to tell time for awhile but since we don't have analog clocks around (I know, I need to hang one up!) he doesn't get much practice. F hadn't been exposed before so I thought it might be fun to make a game of it. I found this site which is great for printables! You can choose how many pieces you want in your set and then the type of picture. I chose Time (Clocks)-- full hours and Time (Clocks)-- half hours (at the bottom of the page).

Here they are printed out and trimmed/laminated:

Ready for play:

I introduced full hours first in a game of memory. It was nice that each clock was a different color, because it helped with the game. After we played memory with the cards a few times, I added in half hours, and then we switched to a game of go fish which worked out really well. After the end of the game they both had a much better idea of how to tell time.

Another game to play with these cards would be to sort them and then arrange them by earliest time to latest time. With younger children you could pick a few of the colors out and just play by color. The kids really love these cards!

sorting seasons by clothing

Montessori for Everyone has a cute printable file for sorting seasons by which clothing is worn. I don't have a laminator but if you do, I'd recommend printing the file on card stock and laminating these. I took the poor woman's version and printed on regular paper, glued to heavy weight paper, and laminated with clear contact paper before cutting them out. We then set up the activity on a woven placemat. As it turns out, some of the cards aren't quite as obvious so it can be solved a couple different ways that are still correct, even with five pieces of clothing for each season. I will probably also print the outdoor season cards as well to mix in with these.

Printed, glued, and covered with clear contact paper.

Cut out.

Season cards placed for sorting.

Trickier than expected, but fun.

bar graphs

Bar graphs are a useful tool for visualizing discretely measurable data. H & F love to sort objects by color, size, type, etc. and we started making bar graphs a few months ago because I thought they would be a fun teaching tool.

What you need:

• paper
• crayons, markers, or pencils
• objects to sort

We made a bar graph for trains this time. F routinely sorts them by color, so I thought it would be fun to see what our train collection looked like in graph form. I drew the axes and labeled them (the child can also do this part), H & F sorted the trains, counted them up, and H colored in the squares on graph paper corresponding to the number of trains we have.

Bar graph of our toy trains

1. Set up your graph with labeled axes

2. Sort your objects.

F did most of the sorting.

We decided to include tenders as well.

3. Fill in the graph (H used colored pencils).

This is an activity they really enjoy and I hope you do too! You can ask your child which color has the least, most, which have the same number, etc. If you are looking for another math tool you can ask how many more of X colored trains would you need to have the same number as Y colored trains, and so on.

toddler dump and fill

Though this isn't something that holds either H's or F's attention for long these days, it kept them busy for long stretches when they were toddlers. I thought I'd share some of our favorites.

What you need:

• Containers
• Cheese shaker
• Sugar container
• Empty coffee cans or other cylinders with plastic tops
• Empty milk or other jug
• Fillers
• Pompoms
• Chenille sticks
• Large play coins
• Straws in different colors/lengths
• Stretchy snakes
• Craft sticks

Some of our favorite containers

This one is nice because it is only semi-transparent

Closeup of the slot I cut in the lid.

Just fill and dump! You can make a sorting game out of it (sort the pompoms by color, or straws by length, etc) or give your child a variety of objects and ask them to sort by which items fit and which are too big.

pi day necklace

Pi day (3.14) is a fun holiday for math geeks and it is just around the corner! If you know me at all, you know just how much I love pi. If there were an e day, I'm sure we would celebrate that as well. There are so many projects you can do with your kids - try pointing out circles you see around the house or out and about, and how pi comes into play (for all of you non math geeks, remember C = πd? If not, head to wikipedia). You can have fun by baking a pi(e), or serving a snack in the shape of pi. This piñata looks like a fun project for next year for us. I hope I don't forget about it!

This year we made pi day pasta necklaces using the first dozen digits of pi. Here are some more if you are an overachiever:

3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286

Pi Day Necklace

What you need:

• beads or pasta you can string, in different shapes, sizes, or colors
• string or yarn
• scissors
• tape (optional)

We used more of our dyed pasta for this. F will be 3 this month and was able to follow the numbers I wrote down on his own so this seems like a good craft for the preschool crowd. He had a lot of fun choosing which (different) piece would come next and then counting them out and stringing them on. Just cut the string to your desired length, add a piece of tape to make the stringing end rigid, and start sorting and stringing them on. Simple and cute!

bowl o' pasta

F stringing

Done!

This project makes me want to hit up the local bead store and make my own pi bracelet!

Here is another post on Pi Day activities.

mystery bag game

This is a great activity to help your child learn about adjectives, and one found in Montessori learning, though typically with two sets of geometric solids. You can describe what you are looking for with words such as smooth, bumpy, round, rough, soft, heavy, light, small, large, squishy, and so on.

1. Find 2 each of geometric shapes, miniature animals, pompoms, straws, etc.

Why yes, those are homemade tree blocks on the left! Future post, I promise!

2. Put one of each in an opaque bag (you may want one with a drawstring if you a peeker).

3. Describe one of the animals outside the bag. Ask your child to find it. Then ask your child to find it in the bag, without looking.

A few variations on this game:

• Put *all* the items in the bag. Pull out one first, then try to find its mate. 
• For younger children, you might want to just use similar (and fewer) items; for example: two balls, two animals, two blocks, two beanbags.
• If you have more than one child, have them sit back to back. Have one child pull out an item and describe it, pass the bag to the next child and have them try to figure out what it is and find the match.

This could make a good car/travel game as well if you include a bag for matches as well.

DIY Color Resemblance Sorting Cubes

DIY Color Resemblance Sorting Cubes

We have a number of Montessori materials at home that we use, but their cost limits the number of items we have. Sometimes it's possible to use the basic idea and make your own substitute. Kid Advance (where I've gotten the bulk of our Montessori items) has a Color Resemblance Sorting Task that looked really cute but $50 for a task that could become boring quickly didn't seem like a good use of money. I thought that using cubes to do a similar task would be fun and also keep with the sensorial nature.

We frequently head to Michaels, 40% off coupon in hand, for art/craft supplies, so on one trip there I looked for and found 3/4" wooden cubes that I thought would work well. Here they are:

Materials Needed to create your own color cubes:

• wooden cubes (or another shape you like)
• craft paint; you will want white as well as a few colors
• paint or foam brush
• mixing palate/tray

You will have to paint the cubes twice since the first time you will only be able to paint 5 sides, so make sure you have time to let them dry enough that you can paint the last side while you still have all your colors mixed. You can use as many shades of a color as you'd like by mixing in different amounts of white paint. Don't worry if they aren't perfect; most kids will beam with pride over something they've created rather than dwell on slight imperfections. I suggest adding the paint colors yourself and then letting your child mix the paint together and paint the cubes one at a time. You will want to make sure the coat is fairly even and not too thick. If it's too thick you won't be able to do fun things like stack them:

You can also make silly mosaics or build towers or whatever else you'd like to do with these sweet little blocks.

Another great way to use these is for measuring. Ask your child to pick out different toys or books they would like to measure and then figure out how many blocks tall (or wide/long) the different items are. It's a great way to explore non-standard measurement, and then compare using a ruler or tape measure.

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