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. 

Fun things to do with toddlers - ball shuttle run

This activity sort of evolved one week day evening, my toddler had watched Monsters University and was inspired by a scene where two characters race each other, he was posing as if on starting blocks then running up and down from the back door in the living room, through the living room to the front door.   I decided to make his running a bit more purposeful by placing a bucket by the front door and a small pile of plastic balls by the back door.

I showed him how he could pick up a ball and run with it to the front door and drop it in the bucket. But his mama didn't raise no fool, he took two balls at a time! Clever boy!

Then I remembered something I had seen on Pinterest with a child dropping balls down a paper towel tube taped to a wall.  I had always thought this was quite a fun idea except that my son would probably get board with it pretty quickly, so I decided to adapt this idea by taping a crisp tube to the wall above the bucket.  My son loved it!  He spent quite a while running back and forth with the balls and even carrying the bucket back to the living room and emptying the balls out onto the floor to start again.  He needed a bit of help replacing the bucket to underneath the tube as sometimes he was putting it into the wrong place and the balls were dropping on the floor.

A fun activity that kept him entertained for quite some time, and gave him a good burst of exercise to tire him out! Also built on his fine motor skills and problem solving skills.

Have you come up with any new fun activities for toddlers recently?  I would love to hear about them, also share your blog posts about activities you do with your toddler.

Fun Things to do With Toddlers - Button Sorting

 Over the years I have amassed quite a collection of buttons from various places and they now all reside in this old lunchbox.  I had though it would be a fun activity for Boris to sort the buttons into different sections of an egg box or different pots and jars.  He is a bit young for this but he did very much enjoy looking at them, picking them up, throwing the about and taking them in and out of the box.  Hopefully when he is older we can use these buttons for counting games, colour and size sorting and crafts.  Until then however I am happy to let him enjoy the feel of them in his little fingers. It improves his fine motor skills and brings him pleasure through a sensory experience.

Getting the buttons out took no time at all, clearing up took a little longer because they were spread quite some distance across the carpet!  We had to end the activity when he got a bit over enthusiastic about throwing them and I had visions of fishing out buttons from between the sofa cushions for weeks to come.
He enjoyed this activity though with younger toddlers it does need to be closely supervised to ensure that no buttons are put into the mouth (or other orifaces!) I know in the not too distant future he will be able to play with them independantly without having to worry about choking of ingestion.