Pegboard Practice {States & Capitals}

To help my son practice capital cities for our great 50 states, I made him a fun pegboard to practice. Here's how I did it (and you can too).

Cut a piece of plywood to 8 1/2 x 11. If you don't have the tools at home, ask a helpful associate for assistance at the hardware store. They're usually able to cut wood to your dimensions upon request. Lightly sand with sandpaper to prevent splinters.

Now print the PDF of states and capitals. The PDF is available for free download from Google Drive here. (You may have to log in to a Google account, though, to access it).

I printed the pages on heavyweight cardstock.

You'll need a special hole punch that can punch holes anywhere on the page. A normal paper punch won't work. I use this one, along with a rubber mallet.

Martha Stewart also has a screw punch that would work. Using your special punch, punch out the holes individually on all seven pages. Make sure to protect your work surface (I usually put the pages on a cutting board). Yes, this is tedious, but totally worth it.

Now set one of the pages on top of your wood. Center 1-inch brad nails in each hole and pound down with a hammer. You will need 16 nails. Leave the nails sticking up about a 1/2 inch or so. With all the nails pounded in, your pegboard is ready. Note: You can do this in your pajama pants if you want. Just sayin'.

Grab eight rubberbands and the pages you printed. Stack the pages, put them onto the board, and hand your child the rubberbands to string from the state to the correct (hopefully) capital.

The PDF includes a 2-page answer sheet, so you can double check your child's work. When my son finished a page, I removed the incorrect rubberbands and he tried again. It was great practice and loads more fun than flipping flashcards.

The pegboard can be used to practice virtually any skill. Print a blank template to practice rhyming words, a foreign language, math facts, etc. Simply laminate before punching the holes and use a dry-erase marker to fill in the practice "questions and answers."

This idea was adapted from FamilyFun magazine.

Printable Underground Railroad Quilt Code Game

This idea has been stuck in my head for awhile, ever since I heard about how quilts were used to communicate to runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. Their patterns and blocks were a code, providing direction, signifying safety, and issuing warnings (according to some historians).

Before my son and I played the game I made, we read the perfect book to pair with this activity - The Patchwork Path: A Quilt Map to Freedom by Bettye Stroud.

Having already read a biography on Harriet Tubman, my son had a basic foundation of knowledge on the Underground Railroad. Stroud's book filled in the rest - explaining how quilt blocks held messages for Hannah and her father on their journey from a Georgia plantation to freedom in Canada.

What You Need to Play the Game

PDF of the 3-page game board and 7 pages of playing cards

Cardstock to print the 10-page PDF on

Tape to piece the game board together

Pictures of slaves who found freedom on the Railroad (I printed
   images of Henry Bibb, Frederick Douglass, Josiah Henson, and
   Harriet Tubman on cardstock and laminated)*

Medium-sized binder clips

Paper cutter to cut the game cards

Prep

Cut the pictures so that when they are inserted into a binder clip, the faces are visible. These are your game pieces.

If necessary trim the white border (this depends on how your printer prints full-bleed pages) on your game board pages so that the map image butts up against each other. Affix the pages with tape on the back.

Cut the game cards apart and shuffle.

The Objective

Be the first to move your game piece along to Cleveland, OH (the Underground Railroad station nicknamed "Hope").

How to Play

Each player picks their game piece and places it on the start star. Everyone should be dealt three cards, which they turn over on the table to look at. (Secrecy is not important.)

Before a player can move to the first space on the game board and leave the plantation to begin their journey on the Underground Railroad, they must play the Monkey Wrench card. If it is not in their hand, they draw and discard either the card drawn or another card in their hand. Play continues this way until they draw the Monkey Wrench card and can start their journey. The same is true for the next quilt block space (Tumbling Blocks).

It may take awhile to get these cards. If you suspect that your child will grow impatient quickly, print more of page 5 and 6 on the PDF so there are more Monkey Wrench and Tumbling Block cards in the deck. Likewise, if you have more than two players, additional cards will be necessary.

Anytime a space along the railroad has a quilt block next to it, the player must play that very same quilt block card in order to move there (and beyond it).

A player can move to any space not designated with a quilt square by playing either a Log Cabin or Flying Geese card.

If a player has multiple Flying Geese or Log Cabin cards, they can all be played on his/her turn (e.g. if two Log Cabin cards are played, the player can advance two spaces). The player must always draw more cards to maintain three cards in their hand.

BEWARE! If you draw the Drunkard's Path card, you must move back 1 space. You cannot play any other cards during this turn. NOTE: if you move back to a space before a quilt square space, you do not have to replay that same quilt block card again to move forward. A Log Cabin or Flying Geese card grants you passage forward.

If you run through the entire deck of cards, simply grab the pile of cards already discarded or played and turn them over to reuse.

VARIATION: Use colored binder clips so each player has multiple game pieces (i.e. all the game pieces for Bobby have blue binder clips, while Sarah has game pieces with red clips). Every time a Monkey Wrench card is drawn, the player can begin moving a new game piece on the journey. Decide to play for 45 minutes (or so) and when the time is up, see how many game pieces for each player made it to Cleveland. The player to free the most slaves is the winner.

This is a great strategy game that piques kids' interest in history, codes, and folk art.

Got a kiddo that's interested in quilts? Or looking for a math extension of this game? What about our Quilt Square Fractions?

*Due to copyright protection, I'm not providing you with printable game pieces. A Google search should result in MANY choices, though.

FUN FROM FOLLOWERS: Multiplication (or Addition) Practice with Battleship

I know a good idea when someone shares one. A homeschooling mom mentioned playing this game with her kids on my Facebook page. I was intrigued. She graciously agreed to write this guest post to describe it for y'all. This mom of two sons, ages 5 and 7 years old, loves to be crafty and play learning games with her boys. Her philosophy fits perfectly with my deceptively educational mission. Enjoy!

Math is not only my oldest sons’ favorite subject but he seems to have a natural ability to understand numbers. However, even with his love for numbers he likes to play games to practice his skills every now and then. Coming up with games for him are not as easy as they are for my younger son. My younger son loves to read not do math, and so I am always making games for him.

I had the idea of a strategy game floating around in my head for a bit before I came up with battleship. Of course my first instinct was to search the internet for a freebie, and I came up empty. So I figured it out on my own, with some grid paper and my label machine.

I knew I needed the grid to cover the multiplication tables 0 – 12. And the ships needed to fit nicely inside that grid. I just cut the graph paper out to match my grid needs and also a couple rows for ships. I used my label maker to name all of the ships. After gluing the grid paper down and labeling my ships I had a game board ready to be tested.

Now the fun begins.

The Objective

The purpose of battleship is to sink your opponent's ships by sending missiles to specific grid coordinates each turn.

How to Play

For this game, the grid coordinates are multiplication equations. Each player gets their own sheet of paper with the two grids (top and bottom) and the list of ships on the left. Place your ships on the top grid, ships must be placed vertical or horizontal and they may not overlap. When calling out your missile coordinates you must first read the top across and then down. You must also say the entire equation, such as “6 x 2 = 12.”

If the equation is said correctly your opponent tells you if your missile is a “hit” or “miss.” We did a few practice “calls for fire” before playing. We used an orange highlighter to mark where our ships were located on the top grid. On the bottom grid, we used blue highlighters to mark where our missiles missed and then pink to mark where our missiles had hits. On my sheet, I also used the top grid to mark the calls for fire my son said. (An extra tip I learned after the first game was to write the answers for each square on my bottom grid, just for less thinking on my part.)

The game was so much fun, my oldest son wanted to play again and my youngest wanted a turn as well. My youngest is working on subtraction not multiplication, but I knew there had to be a way. And then I realized I didn’t need to change anything, just print out two more sheets and use it for addition. That worked out wonderfully, two different levels of game play with just one game board!

We played the game almost every day for a week. However, it didn’t take him long to figure out that Mom kept placing her ships in the rows or columns he needed the most practice with. Since first making the game I have also laminated the sheet inside a file folder. Now we can use dry-erase markers and not print so many sheets of paper. I hope that you have as much fun with this game as we did and that it is helpful with practicing math skills. 

How Does Your Garden Grow? [Coordinate Mapping Game)

It's been awhile since we practiced map skills. I figured we'd revisit them, this time using coordinates on an X and Y axis for a fun game of luck.

The "How Does Your Garden Grow?" game is just as fun for one player, as it is for many. Since I wanted to be my son's opponent, I printed two of the game boards I'd made, one for each of us. 

After I attached the two pieces of the board together, I glued the cut-out vegetable game pieces onto small wooden disks I picked up at our local craft store. With a die (or two, if you prefer) we were set. 

Download a free 2-page PDF of the game board and game pieces here.

My son and I each placed our set of veggies on the intersections of the lines or the upper and far right perimeter of the board, along the grid lines.

Since we planned to play for about six or seven minutes, I set our kitchen timer.

Now my son rolled the die. The first number rolled was for the X axis (the horizontal plane, along the bottom of the garden grid), and the second number rolled on the die was located on the Y axis (or vertical plane). 

With the two numbers located, we looked to see where they intersected and if any of our veggies were there. If so, the game piece was removed from the game board.

You can, of course, say that the rabbits ate your carrots or the bugs infested your tomatoes. Feel free to add your own backstory.

When the timer went off, we counted our veggies. Since some (green beans) have larger quantities, the winner isn't necessarily the person with the most game pieces still on the garden game board when play is over. This snuck some mental addition in to this game of chance.

This is a quick game to play and could easily be made into a travel version for the car or while at a restaurant!!

Spelling Battleship

I wish I could claim this idea as my own, but truthfully, it’s not.

When the well of inspiration ran dry, I turned to my Pinterest boards.

Finding Spelling Battleship on the blog Mrs. T’s First Grade Class, was an experience akin to someone slapping me upside the head, having an “ah-ha” moment, or finding a $20 bill in an old pair of jeans.

Instantly I knew my son would go cRaZY for this!

Battleship is his favorite “board” game right now. Since Jill’s game board was a little smaller than I wanted, I made my own.

All you need is to print two and make sure you have a folder to stand up between players. Oh, and spelling words. You're going to need a handful of those too.

Download a free PDF of this game board here.

Now I picked five of the most challenging words from my son’s spelling list; I specifically picked words that varied in length.

Now we both added the words, one letter per box, to the grid on the left side of the game board. Note: words should not be written diagonally.

Now Player 1 calls out a coordinate (e.g. D2) with the hope that the opponent has written one of the words’ letters in that box. Each time Player 1 calls a coordinate, he/she marks an “X” in that space on the right side of their game board.

If a letter is in the space called, Player 2 says so (and can even indicate the word that was hit or the letter), and instead of an X, Player 1 writes an O in the box called. Player 2 puts an X through the box that was called as well, covering the letter, on the left side of their game board. Coordinates that don't hit letters can also be recorded by Player 2 if they so desire.

Play alternates between two players. When the coordinates for an entire word are hit, the player must announce it. The aim is to call coordinates that successfully locate all the spelling words.

This is SUCH a fun way to reinforce spelling! Thanks, Jill, for sharing your genius!

Finding Friends on the Map [Cardinal Directions]

When we’re in the car, my son thinks going straight means we’re going north. Um … not quite. To help him understand cardinal directions, I decided he should use a compass and practice locating things on a map.

We don’t have a compass, so he made one! We followed the same directions that are posted here. 

All you need is a cork, shallow dish/bowl, needle, water, and a magnet. This was surprisingly easy and fun, too!

My son kept moving the cork to watch the needle spin right back and point north again. Never having worked with a compass before, he was curious to see that it always pointed north.

He thought that it would point in whatever direction you were heading. I explained how once you knew which way was north, you could figure out the rest of the directions.

After our compass was made, I gave him a little activity I’d worked up to practice directions. Before he started, though, I pointed out two things on the makeshift map I’d made: the compass rose and the map scale.

Download a PDF of this map and directions to find friends' locations here.

Next, he read directions and followed them to find friends on the map (an example is below), either beginning at the start or using the clue in the first direction to determine the starting point.

After all eight friends were located, he picked the place he’d want to go and wrote the directions to it.

Of course, my son picked the ice cream shop (like father, like son)!

Graph My Room (Area and Perimeter)

What is it about the measuring tape? My sons both think it’s the best toy ever, never mind that it’s not a toy at all. To capitalize on this fascination, I thought I’d have my son put the measuring tape to good use measuring his room.

I made some large-scale graph paper, printed two sheets, and gave my son the measuring tape.  I explained how 12 inches equals 1 foot. Then I showed him how the feet were marked on the measuring tape.

Step 1: Measure.

Now he measured the length and width of his room, from wall to wall.  We rounded up or down to the nearest foot.

Step 2: Cut the graph paper to represent the room.

I explained that one square on the graph paper was equal to one foot. Then, he counted the number of squares horizontally and vertically on the large graph paper and cut it to represent the space in his room.

Step 3: Measure the furniture. Cut the paper to size. Color it in.

Next, he measured his bed, bedside table, bookshelf, and LEGO table. Each time, cutting the representative sizes from the graph paper. He colored these.

Step 4: Measure and locate the furniture on the room graph.

Now, we measured the distance from the walls to each object. This provided the information my son needed to determine exactly where to locate the various items on the graph paper representation of his bedroom.

Step 5: Figure the perimeter and area of each object and the room.

Before I had my son figure the perimeter and area of his room, I gave him a little background in what the two terms meant.

Since learning by listening isn’t my son’s thing, I found a great online game to help him practice figuring perimeter and area.

When I pulled him away from the game, he did the calculations for his room and its furniture. To figure the area of his entire room, I gave him a calculator (his early multiplication skills are not advanced enough to arrive at an answer without help).

This took a lot of patience, measuring, and math. My son was up for the challenge, though, and even spent time tracing over the calculations he’d made in pencil with pen so he’d have a permanent record in his notebook!

Oceans, Continents, and Directions, Oh My!

When I purchased a subscription to National Geographic Kids magazine for my son, they sent us an inflatable globe. He has been fascinated with it ever since it was filled with my husband’s hot air.

All on his own he began asking me to name a country for him to find. Of course, I didn’t hesitate to honor his request, even writing some of their names down so he could find them easier. When he had trouble, I found myself saying things like, “Look in North America,” “It’s a country in Asia,” or “First find Africa.” Each time, all I got was a blank stare. My son didn’t know the seven continents!

This activity is meant to fix that.

To start, we read a great book that shared information about the terrain, location, peoples, and animals on the Earth’s seven different continents.

Afterwards, I gave my son a printed map of the earth with no labels. I had written the following on the bottom:

North America – green

South America – brown

Europe – purple

Africa - yellow

Asia – red

Australia/Oceania – orange

Antarctica – blue

I asked my son to identify the continents from memory and color each according to this key. He remembered North America, South America, and Antarctica but needed to review Bobbie Kalman’s book again for a refresher to label the others. (And all the little islands off the coast of the continents, which continent do those belong to? We definitely needed the book’s map to answer those questions!)

When my son had color-coded all seven continents, I added their names and had him draw a compass rose on his map. Then I gave him directional clues to help him label the oceans. I said things like “The Pacific Ocean is west of North America” and “The Indian Ocean is south of Asia.” (I helped him with the spelling until all five oceans were added.)

I could tell he was proud of himself. At bedtime, I told him he had five more minutes to look at books before it was ‘lights out.’ He asked to look at his new map instead!

Our continents activity was inspired by a blog post over at 2 Love Learning (if you haven’t stopped there, do!).

Reading a Treasure Map

When my son mastered reading a grid during the Crayon Word Roll activity, I was inspired to test his map-reading skills further. His interest in pirates is still strong so I knew a treasure hunt would excite him.

This activity combined reading clues and a map, all cleverly disguised in a hunt for an inexpensive puzzle treasure.

I drew a floorplan of our house and printed a grid over the top (download the grid I used here). 

Then I wrote five clues that lead him to various places on the map. I gave him the following to start:

You’re hunting for a treasure.

A treasure you will find.

Look at the map. Read the clues.

You’ll have to use your mind.

Go to C5 to begin.

If you get tired, have a seat.

While there, you may even find a treat.

Each of the hidden clues was folded inside of a small cardboard box with a treasure chest sticker on the outside. The first box also contained a piece of candy.

From one clue to the next, he made his way all around our house, getting closer to the treasure until it was found. 

My son L-O-V-E-D this activity! The only thing he struggled with was quelling his excitement enough to slow down and sound out the words in the clues. 


ARRrrr, mateys! This is an excellent way to trick your child into reading!

Crayola Colors Word Roll

Give a kid a grid of 36 words and two dice – one manipulated with the letters A through F – and let the fun begin! That’s what Melissa over at Wishes Dream Love did with her son and it seemed like such an amazing idea, I thought we’d try it at my house.

Instead of practicing sight words, I used the color names printed on the crayons in a box of 24 Crayola crayons. (We had a brand new box leftover from the school year.) I used sticker paper to print A, B, C, D, E, and F stickers to alter one die and Microsoft® Excel to create the grid. All that was left to do was to hand it over to my son.

When he rolled an A and a 2, he found the box on the grid, read the color words, looked through his crayons, and colored that rectangle with “carnation pink.”

He caught on immediately and didn’t stop until every square was colored – even the white ones!

This was a fun activity that got my son reading and taught him a few things about color (e.g. violet is purple so “blue violet” must be a bluish purple color, “apricot” is peach, etc.). Click on the red words above to download the Crayola Colors Word Roll grid or download a blank template here to make your own.