Number Hop Activity

I've teamed up with education.com to bring you another fun learning activity for your little ones.

This activity great for exercising growing muscles and will also help your child learn their numbers.  Balance and co-ordination will also be put to the test as they make their way from number to number.

As we currently have an Arctic theme in our home ed at the moment I used the idea of hopping from ice burg to ice burg, but you could do the leap from theme that education.com suggested to me.

Here are their instructions for the activity, then I will share with you how I adapted this idea for my own children:

What you need:

• 20 sheets of varying colour of construction paper or white sheets of paper for the ice burg hop.
• 1 black marker.

What you do:

1. Help your child set out the sheets of construction paper on a flat surface.
2. Then, using the black marker, let your child draw a number on each card (the numbers 1-20, one per card).
3. Next, help her place the cards on the ground in a line, about a foot apart. You could do variations such as placing the cards counting up, counting down, even numbers, or odd numbers.
4. To play the game, your child should stand at one end of the number line.
5. Call out, “HOP.”
6. Encourage your child to hop onto the nearest lily pad and call out the number.
7. She wins when she makes it to the end of the line, having successfully called out all of the numbers.

Number Leap Frog is a great way to build a strong math foundation for future learning. Not to mention it's a silly and fun way to get lots of exercise and keep those minds and bodies active! 

We adapted this idea to our Arctic theme by using white sheets of paper as "ice burgs".  We played by rolling a die and Boris had to identify the number on the die, then translate that to the written numbers on the "ice burgs".  He had to hop in random directions, sometimes far, sometimes near to get to the right number.  He then had a go at writing some random numbers of his own onto more sheets of paper then insisted that I do the ice burg hop!

It was a fun activity and great for helping to learn number identification.  I felt like I could have extended the idea by using two dice and getting Boris to add the numbers together.

Let me know if you have a go at this idea, I would love to see how you make it work for your children. 

Spy Theme Letter Activity

Hi Everyone,


Today I am blogging for Education.com who have inspired me with their letter detectives preschool activity.  This would be perfect for a Spy or detective themed topic or, you know, just for fun. I would like to try something like this with UV pens and lights too!

Getting a preschooler to sit still and run through the alphabet isn't easy. And why should it be? It sounds boring.

But spice things up with a few adult looking markers and the promise of a hunt, and you're in business. This activity turns kids into word detectives—scouring their way through documents in search of their prey.

For more fun and exciting preschool activities, check out Education.com!

What You Need:

• Highlighters in several colors
• Magazines or newspapers
• Several index cards or post-it notes
• Magnifying glass (optional)

What You Do:

1. Choose a letter of the alphabet. Make sure that your child knows what it looks like, both as a capital letter and as a lowercase. (You may want to print both versions on an index card or post-it note, to give him a reference.) Once you've given your child a target, arm him with a set of old magazines or newspapers to hunt through, and a magnifying glass if you've got one, to add to the Sherlock Holmes experience. As he finds his letter, he should highlight it.
2. Want to add extra excitement? Use a timer and see how many versions of the letter your child can find in two or three minutes. Tally the number and see if she can "beat" it the next time.
3. If your child is having difficulty with this, don't despair. The magazine and newspaper pages may have too much writing on them. You can create your own page using a computer's word processing program. Instead of those Word Searches, so common in the newspaper, you're creating a Letter Search. Be sure to use a large font size, then type letters randomly, using some uppercase and some lowercase letters. To keep frustration levels low, use your focus letter frequently, at least at first. Here's an example of what a letter search for "Aa" would look like.
4. Once your child is finding all of the letters of the alphabet quickly, challenge him with some high frequency words, instead. Some possible words to start with include: “the”, “a”, “to”, “my”, “is”, “you”, and “and”.

The more she practices, the faster she'll get. So keep those highlighters handy, and the hunt fresh.

Hope you have fun with this activity, let me know if you give it a go and if your kids love it.  What other ideas d you use to get your children into letters?