This weekend was super busy and fun for us with family and friends here to share the holiday and with a perpetual buzz of chocolate and sugar moving through little bodies. Okay, and mine, too. Before the party started, though, I stumbled across a very simple but worthwhile activity that Maddy, Owen, and Cora ended up loving. We played it after everyone left and then again before bed for the last few nights.
- Bunny Counting: Thanks to Denise at Explorations for this great idea and for many others that she does with her two girls that I’m already planning on using over here. Woo-hoo! I love to find fantastic sites!! Thank you, Denise!
I used Denise’s templates that I downloaded and printed on cardstock.
The Rabbit Grid Game is here to download, and the Lettuce Grid Game is here to download if you please. Both are pdf files.
One had three rows of five bunnies and the other had two rows of five heads of lettuce. I grabbed a bag of bingo chips–clear red and green–and we used these as our counters. We had one die, and here’s what we did:
1. Maddy and Owen each had a bunny board and a lettuce board. They rolled to see who would go first. Several times, the lowest number went first, and other times the highest went first.
2. One person rolled the die, counted the dots, and placed a chip on that many bunnies. We focused on starting from the left and moving to the right, and filing one row at a time. Then the next person rolled and did the same thing.
3. The first person to fill both boards was the winner.
Talk about a simple activity that sneaks in some learning under the guise of a game!
I plan to make different boards in the next few weeks and to do some variations–drawing circles, boxes, or triangles around objects to practice shapes, grip, and writing; picking foamie or magnetic numbers out of a box and letting that be the way our numbers are chosen, or even scooping beans or bingo counters out of a bowl to determine the number of circles, boxes, etc we make.
This activity is awesome and totally worth your time because:
– it works on one-to-one correspondence like in Dice Match-up;
– it also helps with the return sweep (reading left to right then down and left again) which is a concept of print that children acquire with early literacy; and
– it can be varied depending on how old your learner is–fewer objects for younger, more for older, etc.
– it can be used in so many ways . . . it makes learning exciting for little ones and easy for parents. Thanks again, Denise!
water painting