Rating: 1 out of 4 stars
Izzy loves elevators. Seriously. Last month we went to the planetarium on a family date and we thought we had lost him a couple of times only to find him in the gigantic elevator or on his way there. Who cares about the fake moon rocks, the giant globe, or even the awesome rube goldberg, when there is an elevator around? Good question. So when I found the idea to make a homemade elevator to practice number recognition with, I thought it was genius. Just get some cardboard, glue on some big googly eyes (because when you push them they indent and then pop back out much like an elevator button), and add some round stickers with numbers on them. Viola! But apparently, Izzy is only interested in the real elevators because my homemade one just wasn't cutting it for him. I did manage to get him to go over all of the numbers once, but then he just wanted to peel the stickers off of the eyes and move on with life. Sort of like how we are now officially done talking about numbers and will be starting in to letters next week. We have a ton of letter activities planned so stay tuned! Cost: $2
Rating: 1 out of 4 stars
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Last week Izzy and I had fun making numbers on the floor out of masking tape. While making these numbers, I had all of these awesome ideas going through my head of how we could calmly walk across the numbers together, naming all of them as we went. Then we could go back through and hop on each number the appropriate amount of times, and then we could take the numbers off the floor and Izzy could tell me what each number was as he was peeling it off the floor. Well, that idea might have worked if my Izzy didn't have more energy than the energizer bunny himself. Once those numbers were down, Izzy was off like a lighting bolt running back and forth over those numbers over and over again. Occasionally, he would slow down long enough to name a number or two, but that is no where near as fun as running full speed down the hall screaming like a wild 2 year old maniac. Just to make sure he actually knew what the numbers were, I took the index cards I had made for our feed the monster activity and made them into a matching game for him. He did match all of the cards to the correct number once so I was satisfied that he had successfully reviewed his numbers for the day and so back to running he went. When he started to lose interest in the running (or maybe he was just worn out... finally), I wanted him to peel the tape off the floor since normally he loves peeling tape, but I guess that particular day was the exception because he didn't want anything to do with the peeling process. And since I thought my numbers actually looked quite awesome in all their ran over glory (and I may have been feeling a little lazy too) the tape got left and all of those numbers are still just hanging out on the floor waiting for a rainy day to get taken off. But now that their newness has worn off, Izzy will walk across them as calmly as a 2 year old can and say their names, but then he is off running again :) Cost: Free
Rating: 2 out of 4 stars For one of our number review activities, I covered an empty tissue box with construction paper and decorated it to look like a monster. I also took 10 index cards and wrote down the numbers from 1-10 on them. The opening in the tissue box served as the monsters mouth and the idea was for Izzy to feed all of the index cards with the numbers on them to the monster. However, when it came time to do the activity, Izzy had a different idea in mind and instead of using my beautifully decorated index cards, he fed the monster his magnetic numbers. I did get him to use my index cards once though, but I guess the monster just thought the magnets tasted better. Izzy had fun feeding the monster the magnets and then dumping them back out again and repeated the process a couple of times before moving on for the day. Cost: $1
Rating: 2 out of 4 stars Our first number review activity was number fishing. And let me tell you, fishing this way is almost as hard as fishing for actual real life floppy, stinky, slippery fish! I got the idea to tie a paper clip onto the end of some string and use it to fish for all of Izzy's magnetic numbers which I put in a bowl. And it was really hard! Perhaps it would have worked better if we had a bigger paper clip, but after Izzy tried unsuccessfully a couple of times to fish for his own numbers, he gave up and gave the 'fishing pole' to me so I could fish for him. It would take me quite a while to get a number to stick to the paper clip (half of the time I would just use my fingers rather than actually fishing) but Izzy always thought it was way cool when I finally did get a number hooked. But then he would take the number off the 'pole', say its name and throw it back into the bowl. What? Why couldn't he have put it on the fridge so I wouldn't have to fish for it again? I don't know. Anyway, after struggling with our string and paper clip for a while, I decided to just go get a magnetic truck Izzy has so he could practically smash the numbers and get them to stick that way. Much easier except for the fact that by that time he had lost interest. Oh well. Cost: $1
Rating: 1 out of 4 stars So the fact that I haven't posted in a couple of weeks along with the fact that my last post was a little grumpy might make it seem like I have given up on our activities, but I assure you that is not the case. The thing is, with numbers I wanted to teach Izzy to recognize the numbers and what their names are. I didn't want to go into counting yet (although he can already count on his own) and I wanted to focus on learning one number a day. This left me with not a whole lot of ideas on how to do that. So I ended up doing the same thing every single day, just with the focus on a different number. Our two main activities for number recognition were coloring and doing a dot sticker page. You can get the printables I used for that here and here. Izzy has always loved stickers and he took an interest in coloring just in time for us to start our number recognition coloring pages. I thought that doing the same activities day in and day out for 2 whole weeks would get old after a while, but day after day Izzy kept getting excited when he saw me printing out his worksheets and would proudly carry them to the table by himself. He even got into his own routine where he absolutely had to do the coloring part first before he could move on to the stickers. Silly kid. If you look at the links I have shared for the coloring pages and dot sticker workbook, you may notice that there is not a coloring page for the number 9. I didn't want to skip coloring on 9 day so I just googled it and found some pretty good options. For the dot sticker workbook, the site I got it from recommends putting the correct number of dot stickers on the corresponding number. Since I didn't want to focus on counting for these activities, I just let Izzy put however many stickers he wanted on each number. However, I do plan on making him another book and using it as suggested in a few months. Some other fun things we did for number recognition were building the numbers out of legos (though my lego building skills aren't great, so you don't get any pictures of our attempted creations). And just like for shapes and colors, we had a chart with the numbers on it that he got to put a sticker on every night. If you want to try the lego activity, this site has some great patterns to follow. As for our number chart, we used some Frozen printables we found here. And on days when sisters naps weren't as long as mommy would have hoped, she got to happily supervise Izzy's artwork from her Mega Seat. Now that we have gone through all the numbers from 1 to 10, we will be doing several review activities to cover all of those numbers and then moving on to the big concept of letters!
Cost: $2 for stickers Rating: 3 out of 4 stars (for all activities combined) So lets be honest for a minute. One of the biggest things I have learned from being a mom is how much patience I don't have. There was a time when I considered myself to be a pretty patient person, but now that Izzy is a toddler, I realize that I'm really not as patient as I once thought. And even though we love doing activities and I think they are good for us both, sometimes they have a tendency of highlighting just how impatient I really am. Today's activity is one of those examples. For the activity, I had cut out a paper heart in every color we have talked about and taped them on the floor. My idea was to tell Izzy things like, "Jump on the yellow heart", or, "Stomp on the white heart" and in the perfect world I was imagining in my head, he would do as I asked and be super excited about his activity. But alas, that was only a dream and when it came right down to it all he wanted to do was rip the hearts off the floor. I was getting so frustrated trying to get him to do something with the hearts but he just wasn't interested. We even took a story and snack time break in hopes that he would be more interested when we returned to the activity, but he wasn't. We tried singing songs, having mama give crazy demonstrations, etc, but nothing. I even let him tear one of the hearts off the floor thinking that I could just let him tell me what color all of the hearts were as he ripped them up but once the first heart had been torn to shreds, he wasn't interested in that any more either. I finally did get him to identify the color of each heart once by bribing him with stickers, but lets just say that our last color review activity wasn't as amazing as I had hoped. So what can you learn from all of my impatience and frustration? Well maybe you can try this activity with your little one and everything will be peachy and rosy keen like I had hoped they would be for us. But if not, just don't feel alone in all your frustration. I'm feeling ya... especially today. But hey, at least I got one cute picture of our little heart battle. As I mentioned, this was our last color review activity. Tomorrow we will be moving on to number recognition which will hopefully go smoother than today. And as fun as colors have been, Izzy and I are both ready to move on with life. Cost: $5
Rating: 1.5 out of 4 stars |
AuthorHi! My name is Cassity and I am the mom to a little 2 year old boy named Izzy and a baby girl named Sydney. I am lucky enough to get to be a stay-at-home mom to them and we have fun thinking of new activities to do together in the afternoons. We created this blog as an opportunity to share those activities with you. Archives
March 2015
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