Number Grid Puzzles (free printable)

Our youngest son had a "fill in the missing numbers in the number grid" math assignment. I thought it would be a snap for him, but as he sometimes transposes numbers, it became a source of major frustration. Oy!

To familiarize him a little more with number grids and some of the quick addition and subtraction you can do with them, I made a few activities. These were inspired by Playdough to Plato's peek-a-boo chart and Mrs. T's First Grade Class number puzzles.

You can download this 100 number grid activity for free from Google Drive here. It's a 3-page PDF. 

NOTE: If you are a teacher, use your personal gmail account if it requires you to request permission. Most school districts restrict emails from outside their domain, and therefore I can't grant access and let you know it's available.

Activity #1: 10 more, 10 less, 1 more, 1 less
I printed the number grid on white card stock. I printed page two of the free printable PDF on colored card stock. I cut the center plus-sign out. Then I added white gift wrap tissue squares to the plus signs "arms" making those squares translucent (vellum would work well too), and left the center empty. For the sake of durability, I ran this sheet through my laminator.

With the 10 more, 10 less, 1 more, 1 less page laminated, I wrote some simple math problems on it in the blank area (e.g. 13+10= , 47-10=, 91+1=, 74+1=) with a dry-erase marker. My son placed the laminated page over the number grid so the first number in the equation was in the center. Then he could easily see in the translucent squares which was his answer (i.e. 10 less was directly above, 10 more directly below, 1 more to the right, and 1 less to the left). This made solving the math problems easy!

Activity #2: Number Grid Puzzles
Now I printed the number grid on colored card stock and printed an empty grid on white card stock. I cut the colored grid apart into a variety of puzzles that were about 10-11 squares each. 

Once done, I cut the number squares apart and handed him a few piles of puzzles. He arranged them wherever on the blank grid, remembering 10 less is above, 10 more is below, 1 more is on the right, 1 less is on the left. When he completed this puzzle, he moved on to the next. You can make approximately 7-8 puzzles per grid.

Skip Counting Connect-the-Dots Letter Puzzles

My 1st grader came home from school the first week and was distraught that he'd had trouble skip counting by 2s. "Can we practice, Mom?" Um ... yeah!

Since his teacher is also sending home short lists of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) spelling words, I thought I'd combine the two skills.

I made connect-the-dot pages that when finished form the letters of the alphabet (capital letters only at this point). 

Download the 13-page PDF for free from Google Drive here.

I grabbed the spelling list and printed the pages with the letters I needed, cut them apart, labeled them 1-3 so he'd know the order of the letters, snipped the corner of each page (so he wouldn't know which letter he was working on), and told him to start with the star and count by 2s.

He was amused and truly enjoyed the discovery aspect of this activity. First, it was fun to see what letter he made. Then it was fun to see what word the three letters formed (e.g. web, hen, pet, pen, etc.).

Linking Word Family Chains -at, -am, -an, -ay, -ap (free printable)

Our kindergarten son's literacy skills are growing by leaps and bounds, but I wanted to continue to show him the pattern in words, what makes them rhyme, and how much easier it is to read when you recognize the sound of their endings. With this aim, I completed another word family activity.

This free printable can be used in a variety of ways. The flexibility makes it easy to customize for your child.

What You Need

3-page PDF of the word links (download it free from Google Drive here)

Heavyweight card stock, plain or colored paper

Prep

Print and cut out the links on the dark black lines. Scramble together

Play: Option 1

Have the child see how many words they can make by combining the links' beginning sounds with the word family endings. 

Play: Option 2

Divide the links into even piles for each child. Have them see who can make the longest chain, or complete a chain the fastest.

Play: Option 3

See how long of a chain your child can make on the floor. Can they loop it around the furniture or make it go in a circle?

Fraction, Decimal, and Percent Puzzles (free printable)

Good golly, converting fractions to decimals and percents can be a challenge. To help our 10-year-old memorize some of the most common ones, I created a series of 3-piece puzzles that are self checking.

Download the 4-page PDF of the puzzles for free from Google Drive here.

Construction

I wanted my pieces to be thick so they'd stay together. In order to do this, I glued the printed puzzles onto thin sheets of craft foam (I recommend FOAMIES glue). I then glued various scrapbooking papers (a different design for each puzzle) on the back. Lastly, I used a exacto craft knife to cut the pieces out once the pieces were totally dried.

Truthfully, it was a pain. While I achieved my objective, if I had it to do all over again, I'd skip the craft foam and just glue the scrapbooking papers to the backs of the puzzles and maybe laminate (for durability). Cutting them out would be MUCH easier.

Play = Practice

I dumped them all number side up in front of my son and let him work through finding each 3-piece puzzle, matching 0.5, 1/2, and 50%, for example. When he thought he had all three pieces of a puzzle found, he turned them over to check that they all had the same paper on the back. Voila! That's the self-checking part.

The papers are necessary because not all the puzzles have different shaped pieces.

My son really loved this challenge!

Snacktastic Spelling Review

A pinner once commented that they loved my LEGO minifigure spelling activity but the prep was pretty extensive. She's right. That's not exactly the kind of activity you throw together five minutes before your kid gets off the bus with the spelling test looming the next day. However, this idea is precisely that kind of activity.

It's one of my quick, go-to, oops-we-haven't-practiced-spelling-yet-this-week kind of activities. Five-minute prep is something this mom appreciates. Not to mention that I can start chopping veggies for dinner while reading the words on the list to my son. (Sometimes multitasking is just as important as spelling tests!)

Quick Prep

Since my son often studies for spelling after school, there's usually a snack involved. But you can certainly do this activity without food. Grab a piece of paper with a grid (download some large-scale graph paper here). Write each of your child's spelling words in the empty grid, one right after the next so each immediately follows one another. Keep them from overlapping but have them wind around the page, starting in the upper left corner.

SPELLING WORDS IN ORDER: farmer, worker, mayor, television, electric.

Make sure the last letter of the last word is on the grid's perimeter. Write the name of a snack (e.g. string cheese) next to it. Write a few other snacks around the grid's edge in various places.

Fill in the empty boxes in the grid with other letters, being careful not to put any of the letters in the spelling words adjacent to the words.

Spell Away!

Now read the spelling list in the same order and have your child draw a line from one box to the next, spelling the words. 

When they reach the end, he/she will find out which snack they're having!

Love in Many Languages Puzzles

Have you seen that commercial from Allstate? The one with the male (supposedly) French model she met on the Internet? My seven year old has been walking around the house saying “bonjour” thanks to this little marketing spot.

To springboard off his new found interest in foreign languages, I made him a series of four heart-shaped puzzles.

Each heart contains three pieces: the shape of a country, that country’s flag, and the way you say “I love you” in the language spoken there.

Download a free 2-page PDF of these puzzles here.

I printed the puzzles on cardstock, spray glued them to craft foam and cut them out. Then I jumbled them all together so my son had to really work to put them together.

He referred to his Reader’s Digest Children’s Atlas (which has each country’s flag in the back) for help.

While this wasn’t an extensive foreign language lesson, it was fun to exchange I love yous with my son in a language other than English!

Alphabetical Adjectives Connect the Dots

I’m a writer. My son is not. But that hasn’t stopped me from trying to sharpen his language arts skills.

This word nerd came up with a sneaky way to do it, too: connect the dots!

To jog my son’s memory that adjectives are describing words, we read a Brian P. Cleary book. Hairy, Scary, Ordinary: What is an Adjective? is fun and engaging language arts literature at its best.

The illustrations are clever and whimsical and the text is chock full of adjectives which are set off with color (the rest of the words are black). So far, every book from Cleary’s Words Are CATegorical series has been a hit with my son and me.

For a little adjective practice, I made a great puzzle.

Download a PDF of this connect-the-dots puzzle here.

The instructions were simple – start at the red star and connect the lowercase adjectives alphabetically. When you get to “z,” start over with uppercase adjectives until you’re back where you started. Lastly, connect the square dots drawing a line from number to number starting at one black star and ending at the other.

My son did quite well. He only had to use the eraser a few times and, when finished, he was so proud of his songbird connect-the-dots picture! (This mama writer was mighty proud too.)

Dinosaur-themed Logic Puzzles

Now, even though my hatred of math started at a very young age, I always enjoyed doing logic puzzles. I remember “playing” them with my Mom as a young girl. (How's that for proof that my desire to trick my child into learning is hereditary?!?)

Banking on my son enjoying them as much as I did, I made some dinosaur-themed puzzles for him.

I used his National Geographic Dino-pedia to get some of the info.

My son knew a lot of the facts he needed to solve these puzzles, but when he got hung up, he used the book. All the boxes with possibilities that were eliminated were crossed out. This helped him narrow down the right answer (he colored these boxes yellow) for each question in the puzzle.

He matched dinosaurs to the right diet (carnivore, omnivore, or herbivore), figured out what countries different dinos lived in, and helped locate lost kids in the dinosaur museum! (Download the puzzles and answer sheet here.)

These three logic puzzles are a great precursor to higher level deductive thinking. And even those kiddos who struggle with math will enjoy them!

For more great logic puzzles (in loads of themes), visit EnchantedLearning.com.

Brain Bender Subtraction Puzzles

My mother-in-law bought my son a Scramble Squares puzzle. It has challenged all of us to no avail. It’s certainly been fun, though! Watching my son play with it gave me the idea to make a brain bender math puzzle!

Since my son's teacher told us at his parent-teacher conference that his addition skills were stronger than his subtraction, I thought this would be a good chance to give him more practice.

I made two puzzles of varying difficulty.

Download a PDF of these puzzles here.

I printed each on sticker paper and attached them to an empty cereal box (like I did for both the magic squares and letter magnets I made in the past). I cut them out, attached magnet tape to the back, and handed the easier of the two puzzles (blue) over to my son with a small magnetic board. 

I told him that all the pieces needed to form the shape of one large triangle. He needed to position each triangle magnet so every problem was adjacent to the corresponding answer.

He struggled at first. Before he got too frustrated, I put the top most triangle on the board and told him to work off of that. In no time, the whole triangle was put together!

NOTE: Depending on how saturated the ink is on the paper when you print the blue puzzle, you may need to draw a line under the numbers 6 and 9 on the answer triangles so they are not confused. While this was part of the original design, I found that the ink bled when I printed them and needed to redraw the lines.

Magic Squares = Magic Math

I found a wonderful little book at the library about magic squares. Magic AND math? Really? What could be better?!?!

A magic square is a square grid of different numbers. When you add the numbers across, down, and diagonal, they all add up to the same number!

My son and I read the beginning of Colleen Adams' book, which explained magic squares and shared the ancient tale of a tortoise in China whose shell had dots that formed a magic square.

The book also shared the engraving by German artist Albrecht Durer from 1514 that contained a magic square that added to 34.

To give my son a little math practice, I made some number magnets 1-9, using the same process as the alphabet magnets I’ve made in the past. Then, I gave him a small magnetic board and arranged several of the magnets, leaving four or five off. It was up to him to figure out where to place the remaining magnets to equal 15 in every row, column, and diagonal.

He needed to use both addition AND subtraction to complete the magic square! What fun!

Download the number magnets I made, as well as four configurations of magic squares that add to 15 here.

Spelling Practice with Nautical Flags

Back when we practiced fractions with nautical flags, I discovered something pretty awesome about them: there is a flag for each letter of the alphabet! Cool, huh?

Deciphering secret codes is ALWAYS a favorite activity of my son’s so I knew that using the flags to practice sight and spelling words would be a hit. I was right.

I designed a nautical flag alpha key, three pages of sight word codes, and a 1-page sentence cipher. Download them here.

When my son got home from school, I quickly took his new spelling list and made that into a customized worksheet for him. While I was doing that, my son read aloud a book by Lois Lenski: The Little Sailboat. It didn’t explain the flags or teach him much about sailing, but it was a cute fiction story that related to our activity and snuck in some reading practice (hee hee).

Afterwards, I gave him the key and a few pages to decode. He got right after it, completing the pages in no time. He didn’t even realize he was practicing for the week’s spelling test. Mission accomplished!

The answers to the pages I made are below. Enjoy!

The sentence cipher on page 4 says, "Good job. You are so awesome!"

EXTENSION IDEA: Print four pages of the nautical flag alpha key. Set one aside. Glue the other three pages to chipboard (aka empty cereal boxes), cut out, and attach magnet tape to the back (I did something similar here). That way you can easily make codes out of ANY words ... or better yet, your child can make codes for their friends or siblings to decipher!

Easy Reader Puzzle

When my son used to read aloud, he sort of sounded like a robot. It always left me wondering, “Does he really comprehend the story or is he just reading the words?” To satisfy my curiosity awhile back, I got him a new Level 1 easy reader Hot Wheels book called Volcano Blast!

Then I created a crossword puzzle whose hints and answers all related to the story. To do this, I used Discovery Education’s free online Criss Cross puzzlemaker. I kept the clues to a minimum (only 9), left the default settings for the number of squares as is (Width 50; Height 50), and made the puzzle squares large enough for his giant handwriting (square size = 50).

After he read the book, I gave him the puzzle and explained how the answers to the clues would either be written across or down with one letter in each box. I answered the first question as an example.

To my surprise, he did a great job remembering the story details! In order to spell the words correctly, though, he had to turn back to the pages of the book and locate the answer words.

Although the crossword squares were larger than what you’d find in the local newspaper, they still challenged my son’s fine motor skills. Not only that, but now he knows how to spell the word ‘lava.’

It’s All the Same (a Math Puzzle Game)

I wanted a fun way for my son to see how that the same math problem can be written in different ways. And I wanted him to be able check his work independently, similar to the Lock and Key Math game I made.

So I created a series of 12 puzzles for my son to play. 

Each puzzle has three pieces: 1) a multiplication problem, 2) an addition problem, and 3) groupings of dots.

Download 12 puzzles and the game board here.

To keep the pieces from slipping around, I spray glued sheets of felt to the back of the puzzles (printed on cardstock) before cutting them out and used another felt sheet as the game board. It worked perfectly!

I wish you could have heard the “YEESSSSSS” my son shouted after each puzzle was assembled. It was thrilling to see him catch on and enjoy this so much. 

These puzzles would be great for preschoolers and kindergarteners working on numbers. One piece could have the numeral, another with the number spelled out, and the last piece could display the equivalent number of dots. To make these, download the blank puzzles here.

Spelling with Cheez-Its

I love the Scrabble Junior Cheez-Its. Whenever it’s my son’s turn to take a snack to school and I’m too busy (or lazy) to whip up muffins or trail mix, these are my go-to purchase.

Since my son often does his afterschool activities while eating a snack, using Cheez-Its for our activity was perfect! I created a worksheet with some blanks and a grid. 

Download the Cheez-It Spelling worksheet here.

Then I added the snack crackers to the grid, being careful not to include any letter more than once.

Next I told my son to look and see what words he could make with the letters. For now, I let him move the crackers to try-out different combinations but eventually, we’ll play this like Boggle, where he’ll have to find the words in the grid, without moving the letters.

 

This may be one of the simplest activities we’ve done, but it was deliciously fun and can easily be repeated over and over again without getting boring.

My son came up with some great words – including the name of his new LEGO Ninjago figure Zane.

Sometimes it’s fun to play with your food.

Just ask my son!

Keyboard Codes (Spelling Practice with a Homemade Laptop)

My son LOVES the computer, so I’m constantly in search of great online (educational) games for him to play. When I saw Joyful Mama’s post on the felt laptop she made for her daughter, Sweatpea, it jumpstarted my creative juices.

Since we’re still working on spelling those word-wall words my son is bringing home from school (check out Roll & Write for some history on that), I thought a DIY laptop would be perfect!

I knew, though, that if I put a pretend laptop in front of my son and asked him to type the words he would lose interest quickly. To prevent that from happening, I created ciphers (each was a sight word from school) for him to decode using the keyboard. This was SO MUCH fun!

1. Make a DIY Laptop

Use a large flat, rectangular piece of corrugated cardboard (mine was the packaging that came with a 16x20 picture frame I bought recently). Score in the middle so you can fold your laptop. Cut the holes off of an 8 ½ x 11 plastic sheet protector. Use a glue gun to adhere the sleeve above the fold for your laptop’s monitor.

Download and print the keyboard I made (click here). Glue it to your cardboard laptop below the fold. If you want, draw a rectangle below the spacebar for a touchpad.

Next cut another piece of cardboard to make a kickstand to keep your laptop’s monitor from flopping over. Attach to the back of the “monitor” using a glue gun.

2. Read

I love to pair a great book with every activity, so for this one we read Doreen Cronin's Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type. It's hilarious!

3. Help Your Child Decipher Keyboard Codes

Pages 2-4 of the keyboard download have sight-word keyboard codes. Give one of these pages to your child along with the laptop.

The two-digit codes are numerical with the first number indicating the row and the second number representing the number of keys in that row that a child will count (from the left). For example, if the code is 33, a child will count down three rows and over three keys; hence, the letter is D.

4. Have Them Type the Sight Words

This was a lot of word work for my son. Once he completed decoding all 12 words from the first worksheet, I told him to find one 2-letter, 3-letter, and 4-letter word and circle each. Then I slipped his completed keyboard codes paper into the monitor’s plastic sleeve and he typed each of those three words.

When this was done, my son had loads of fun playing with his new “toy.” Since I had all the supplies for this activity on hand, I have no doubt that this is the cheapest computer I will ever buy him.