The Joyful Keeper: numbers

Showing posts with label numbers. Show all posts

Tuesday, 15 July 2014

Tots on a Tuesday {counting and lacing with bottle tops}

For a while now, I have been collecting lids from milk bottles, and from milk cartons and baby food pouches. They just looked so USEFUL.

Do you not find yourself doing that? Thinking "I can't throw that away, I'm sure I could use it for something?". Someone else in this house is worse than me, and often the things HAVE been useful, many moons later, and for a random variety of things.

Call me Madame Cholet and be done with it.

You don't know what I'm talking about?

Well, if you have a tot, let them enjoy this.

Back to my lids.

Here in the UK there are generally 4 different lid colours on milk cartons, depending on the type of milk. Blue is full fat, green is semi-skimmed and red is skimmed. (In the US, you call them all different things). There is also a brand that has a purple lid, and one shop sells it with an orange lid. I have quite a lot of them, and was sure I could use them.

I finally settled upon a good use, whilst I have been finding fun ways to do counting, as well as working on fine motor skills. I thought they would make a super duper lacing "bead"!

I have a tool, for punchiing holes - it's a craft tool, but you can easily find them online.

I first of all punched a hole in the centre of each lid. You want to do this on a self-healing mat, or on a solid chopping board that you don't mind having little circles all over!

I wanted to make this an activity where I could check that they had done it right, so I made some laminated cards with numbers on them, and then punched a hole in the bottom of them.

I then got some yarn, and tied a length onto the bottom of each card. If you get a piece of tape, and wrap it around the end of the piece of yarn, it makes it like a lace, and easier to thread through a hole. Of course, I had to make the yarn match the number on each card. Pretty rainbows!

This is me taping the bottoms of the yarn - Elijah snapped the picture!

Once all the preparation was done, I got them to line the cards up in numerical order.

This is Elijah lining them up, all very neatly and precisely, as is his way!

Then, they got busy lacing the lids onto the yarn - the right number of lids for the number, on the "lace".

(Look at that concentration!!)

This is Simeon, with his own lids to play with! Getting a non-blurry photo of this boy is HARD - he's always on the move!

This is Elijah ~~trying out for the British Skydiving Team~~ showing off his handiwork!

He does love to pose with any work he does!

Don't they look pretty?

They had great fun doing this, and it added another way to reinforce recognising numbers, ordering numbers, hand-eye co-ordination, and fine motor control. You could do the numbers and limit them to being the colours of the bottle lids, and then you would have a colour matching activity, too!

If you don't have a printer and laminator, you could easily do this with pieces of card, and some coloured pens.

Personally, I love my laminator. Sad, but true!

Oh, and here's how I store my activities.

Little zip-lock bags, which I bought from Amazon.

So, there you have it. My "wombling" tendencies have turned my milk bottle lids into a useful tool!

Oh, and just as an aside...

Someone's on the up and up - now the fun really begins! Another "tot" on her feet!

Tuesday, 17 June 2014

Tots on a Tuesday {fun ways to count and learn numbers}

I realised, recently, that a couple of my little ones didn't quite have their number recognition sorted. The older child was understanding certain maths concepts, but not able to recognise the number in the sum!

So, I set out to find some fun and interesting ways to tie up number recognition, with counting.

I conventiently viisted The Range, just as I was about to set out doing these activities, and I picked up a few items that would be helpful. These are all things that you could find in other places - not necessarily the identical item, but similar, and still able to function the same way.

So, what were they?

Rainbow pom poms, wooden numbers and clothes pins with hearts on the end!

The heart pegs, I numbered from 1-20, with a Sharpie, on the heart end. There are loads of things you could do with them, but I decided to grab some items I had in the house, and use them to do some counting. I got the tu of "children's" buttons (not my nice ones!), and got them to first put the numbers in order, then to count out the correct number of buttons into each section in the egg carton! They had a lot of fun doing this!

You could easily find similar, small, wooden pegs in a craft store, or even a hardware store! I have found similar ones in Poundland before.

(Keeping it real - this is what happened when Simeon got the buttons!)

Then, we got to using out wooden numbers and our pom poms. Now, when you want to use any item to count to ten, and want to have the exact number of items to do so, it's helpful to know you need 55 items... my pack had 50! Not to self - buy more pom poms!)

I just love rainbow things, so these were a real find! As I say, I *MUST* buy some more! Once again, though, you could use any pom poms, or any other manipulative, like buttons, counters, and such like.

Another activity we did, which I don't have a picture of right now, is having them draw around the wooden numbers, then draw items matching that number - 1 bee, 2 flowers, etc etc. A year ago, Abi wouldn't have enjoyed doing that, but she enjoys drawing much more now. Elijah? He would draw until the cows came home! You could use these numbers for kinesthetic tracing, getting them to trace the number with their finger on the actual number, or inside the shape once they have drawn it. That all reinforces, in their brain, how to form the number.

We did another couple of activities, with some items we already had. First off, we used some printables from Confessions of a Homeschooler. I think I may have shared them before, or perhaps the alphabet ones?

You can easily find these wooden, geometric shapes, in online stores such as Amazon. I have a set of them. I also have a set of shapes, very similar, in our Spielgaben set (which is something I plan to tell you about very soon!). I have these printed out for 0-20, but we just focussed on the 1-10.