Have a Ball with Math

January 22, 2020Leave a comment

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Travis has shown a keen interest in numbers and basic math lately. So today we had a ball (literally!), playing games that played around with numbers and worked his gross motor skills.

First up, we played backwards toss. Toss a ball back and forth, but instead of counting up each catch, count down. This is a great way to introduce the idea of subtraction, even before a child is ready for equations. Touchdown!

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Next we returned to counting up, but used skip counting. He loved grasping how the numbers went from 5 to 10 to 15 to 20 and so forth up to 100. Plus I noticed improvement in his hand-eye coordination even over the course of a few rounds!

After school, we played a kicking game. I cut three holes in a piece of cardboard, each hole worth different points, again using skip-counting by 5s.

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Travis was in charge of the tally!

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I showed him how to make tally marks in bundles of 5, which we then totted up to find out our final scores.

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Score one for the math team!

Flashlight Word Game

January 7, 2020Leave a comment

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Travis can make his way through a few early phonics books, and although I’m not quite ready to call him a “reader”, I know he’s on the cusp. This cute bedtime game can hopefully tip him towards that edge!

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I wrote out a list of sight words on brightly colored construction paper, and taped them in a pattern along our playroom wall. (Note: you can also make this an “upstairs” game for right before bed, but since I knew we’d want to play after baby sister was asleep, I kept the game downstairs).

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There are several ways we played the game, all of which boost Travis’s sight reading! In the first version, I shined the flashlight on a word and he had to read it.

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Then it was his turn to challenge mommy! He shined the light, and laughed if I pretended to have a hard time with a word.

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For extra literacy fun, have your child first read the word, then put it in a full sentence. This is great for sight words like ‘for’ and ‘four’, or ‘two’ and ‘to’.

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Finally, you can play a sort of reverse version, calling out a word and then having your child find it with the flashlight.

Little sibs might want to play, too, and can look for letters instead of reading full words!

Thankful Spelling

November 22, 2019Leave a comment

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Travis is quite proud of his spelling lately, so the Thanksgiving holiday was the perfect opportunity to practice with stick writing. What an advancement from when he and I made the alphabet in sticks before kindergarten started!

After a quick walk, we returned home with lots of little sticks. Make sure you have some that are long and some that are shorter.

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I had him carefully sound out the word T-H-A-N-K-S. As we got to each letter, he crafted it from sticks. He loved finding just the right piece, for example shorter sticks to cross his H or A.

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S was tricky, so we ended up snapping a long stick in such a way that it curved twice. He had so much fun that he continued to make letters on the floor for a while after! And I was thankful for that.

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Gallant Challenge: Lived It, Learned It

November 10, 2019Leave a comment

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Travis always loves the Goofus and Gallant page of Highlights magazine and the inspiring stories of kids with Gallant moments. We’ve even tried to replicate some. Today, it was his turn to be the Gallant kid and inspire others, because the challenge was…to share a Gallant learning moment and impart that wisdom to other kids.

Travis and I read the challenge and then I asked him to think about just such a teachable moment that he has experienced.

He decided he’d write about times at the playground where his friend is sad. Saying “I’m sorry”, he’s learned, helps make things better.

He drew a picture, including the rocks that they like to play on at the playground. I helped him use creative spelling for the word “sorry”, then wrote out the full story on the back of the page.

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For full ownership of the project, he even affixed the stamp before we mailed it off to Highlights. Travis was so proud to share!

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Serious Secrets of the Circle

November 6, 2019November 6, 2019Leave a comment

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Travis was bit young for the lesson on Pi that accompanied his Jack-O’-Pot Pie recipe from Raddish Kids, but there were plenty of suggested activities for younger kids. Without the advanced math, you can still explore circles and their properties with those in Pre-k or kindergarten.

First, check out a copy of Lois Ehlert’s Color Zoo from the library. Go to the first page with a circle, and cover behind it with a piece of paper.

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Ask your child what animal it might be, then remove the white paper for the reveal of a tiger face. We went through the rest of the book, each animal’s face featuring a different shape.

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I reminded Travis how everything in the world is made up of shapes, but today we’d be focusing on circles… Circle detectives!

I set out a plate (itself a circle!) with other circular items on it, including a ring, coin, cucumber slice, and bottle cap. Other easy ideas would be a button, slice of orange, or wheel.

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I invited Travis to investigate the items. What did he notice? He noted how they all had no corners, they were round, they were flat (don’t use spheres like balls!) and they could spin or roll. He had helped define a circle!

With the detective work complete, it was time for circle art. I had pre-cut lots of different sizes and color circles from construction paper. His challenge was to make a picture or shape of something, but only using circles!

At first he seemed stumped. I showed him an animal face and we quickly decided it was a mouse.

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Once he had the idea, he began gluing down circles as a Star Wars space craft.

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But then when he saw there were more than just black circles to work with, he became excited and began piling them up. It turned out to be a building!

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You can use other materials like tin foil circles, wrapping paper, or tissue paper for embellishment. Have fun with this part!

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For extra circular art, I cut the bottom from a paper plate. The challenge was to cover this plate with red circles using only the end of a toilet paper tube as his paint brush, stamping only circles over it!

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He decided he liked his with some plate still showing through, but your kids might enjoy seeing how long it takes to completely cover the circle with, well, circles.

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Now we became detectives again. He selected two favorite books and we had a competition. Whose book had more circles in it? We marked each page with circles with a post-it note, then tallied them up. Mommy’s book won, with 21 pages of circles!

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(Note: you could also tally up every circle in the images, but this would have taken us into the 100s).

For some final fun, we extended the lesson into story time, reading the following:

So Many Circles, So Many Squares by Tana Hoban
Around the Park: A Book About Circles by Christianne Jones

Eat the Alphabet

August 14, 2019August 30, 20191 Comment

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What better way to conclude an almost-kindergartner’s summer alphabet lessons than to eat your way through it? Each day for 26 days at snack time, I gave Travis a food starting with a letter, in alphabetical order. He had to make that letter first, then – yum – gobble it up! Without further ado, Travis nibbled his way through:

A for apples

Eat Alph A