Count and Stamp with LEGOs

My son’s favorite toy is LEGOs. (Who am I kidding? They’re probably my favorite toy too.) They are great fine motor practice, encourage creativity and role play, don’t require batteries, and don’t make noise. To work on counting with my son, I created this LEGO math activity.

What you need:

LEGO stamping answer sheet and number cards

Washable ink stamp pad

LEGO blocks (no flat ones or one-dot blocks)

A few plies of paper towel or a piece of craft foam

Plastic hollow popsicle stick (mine came in Wilton’s Lollipop Wrapping Kit)

Download the answer sheet and printable number cards from Google Docs here.

What he did:

My son drew a card and wrote the numeral on his answer sheet. Then he dug through the bowl of LEGOs to find blocks which had dots that added up to the number on his card. Insert the popsicle stick into the back of the block (it won’t fit inside the circles, but rather between the side of the block and the center circles). 

Press into the ink and stamp in the box on the answer sheet next to the printed numeral. Note: place paper towels or foam sheet under the paper so the imprints are more visible.

Voila, math with LEGOs!


PS – Like the LEGO number cards I made? Make your own LEGO numbers using instructions from the LEGO website. My son LOVED doing this! 

Frogs and Toads - A Lesson in Differences

“What’s the difference between a frog and a toad?” my son asked me one day. I had to admit, I didn’t know.

Thankfully, one very smart author does. Mary Firestone wrote a wonderful book that’s full of great facts about these amphibians and, not only was it instrumental in answering my son’s question, but its painted illustrations captivated us both.

Reading Firestone’s book taught us the following:

• Frogs have a slimmer body than toads.
• Their legs are longer too.
• Toads have bumpy skin, whereas a frog’s skin is smooth.
• Frogs can be found in water, trees, and on land. Toads stick to the ground.
• Some frogs have webbed toes on their back feet; toads don't.

After I finished reading to him, I handed my son some cardstock cut-outs and asked him to compare. Which body was fatter? Was that the frog or the toad then? Which legs were longer? Are they the frog’s or toad’s legs? (Download my templates here.)

Once he got it all straightened out, he painted each. To make the frog’s body slick, we covered it in packaging tape. To make the toad’s body wart-like, he sprinkled lentils over white school glue. The legs were attached with brads.

Lastly, I gave him two pieces of cardstock that said “A frog lives ….” and “A toad lives …” and asked him to finished the sentences. Then, he painted their habitats.


My son refused to glue down his frog and toad because “then they won’t be able to jump, Mom!” A sticky dot of Velcro behind each was the perfect solution!


When Daddy got home from work that night, my son showed him the pictures and pointed out all the differences between his frog and toad. Now no one in our family is clueless about what sets these two amphibians apart!

It’s a Stick Up! (Counting Money Role Play)

Lately, my son is fascinated with money. I know, you think I mean spending it, right? Nope. He wants to know who’s on each bill and loves the ‘secret’ watermarks you see when you hold the newly designed bills up to the light.

To give him a little practice counting bills, though, I decided to make some funny money for him. (I wasn’t about to risk him losing all of our Monopoly money.) 

I printed several sheets of each denomination (1s, 5s, 10s, 20s, 50s, and 100s) on cardstock.

Once I cut the bills apart, it was time I put on my acting hat. I admit; I was pretty rusty (the last time I acted was in an 8^th-grade school play). Thankfully, my son isn’t a tough critic.

Download the clown-faced funny money here.
If you’d rather add your child’s picture to the bills like I did,
e-mail me and I’ll send you the Microsoft Publisher files to adapt.

I told him to pretend he worked at a bank and gave him a (shuffled) random amount of money. He needed to sort the funny money into piles and put the piles in order from smallest to largest denomination. Next, he counted each pile.

I made three columns in his notebook. Down the first column, I wrote each denomination. Over the second column, I wrote “how many?” And under the third column I wrote “how much $?” His task was to write down the number of bills he had in each pile and figure out how much money that amounted to (essentially how much money was “in the bank”). I added all his subtotals up for him.

Then, I held a stick up with a small toy squirt gun (don’t worry, it wasn’t loaded). My son thought I was being funny until I took some bills from each of his piles; then, his jaw dropped.

Now it was time to count the money again, recording the values once more in his notebook. After counting each denomination, he’d look at the previous numbers and tell me things like, “You took three ten-dollar bills.”

After he’d recounted his money, I told him that the police had caught the crook and recovered the money; however, he needed to count it to make sure that they got all the money back.

This was SO much fun that my son never complained about all the counting and subtracting. It really put his skip-counting skills to the test, too. Success!

Nuts and Bolts Game

Can you imagine asking a 6-year-old to pick up Cheerios one at a time and place them in a bowl? Me neither. I can just hear the “bbbboooooorrrrrriiiinnnnggg” coming out of his mouth. When my son’s perfectly delightful reading summer camp teacher told me this would be a great way to increase his fine motor skills for writing, I simply nodded. Then I went home and brainstormed. There had to be a more fun way to give him some fine motor practice, right?

That’s when I came up with the nuts and bolts game and ushered my husband off to the hardware store to pick up the necessary supplies.

Supplies

8 1/2-inch x 2 1/2-inch carriage bolts

8 (or 16) 1/2-inch hex nuts (8 nuts for quick play; 16 for longer play)

Labels (download a PDF from Google Docs here)

Cards (download the front and back printables from Google Docs)

Sticker paper to print the labels on

Cardstock to print the cards on


How to Play

1. Each child selects one bolt and draws a card.
2. Depending on what that card says (either ‘rhyme,’ ‘opposite,’ or ‘shape’), he/she must look at the word/shape on the bolt and find the nut with the appropriate word on it and then screw it on.  For example, if a child picks the bolt with the word “head” on it and draws the “opposite” card, they must find the nut with the word “feet” on it. (The cards are color-coded to make this easier.)
3. If the nut a child needs has already been used, he/she returns the bolt to the pile and play continues with the opponent taking a turn.
4. The game ends when either all the bolts have been matched with nuts or no more can be matched.

This game is great for practicing rhyming, shape names, and opposites! To make it challenging, I purposely picked rhyming words which had different spellings (e.g., sun and done instead of sun and fun) and a few shapes I was sure my son wasn't familiar with, such as parallelogram and pentagon.

Note: The first time we played this, I only labeled eight of the "prolonged play" nuts. It was pretty discouraging when my son couldn’t make the matches from the cards he drew, because the nuts he needed were already used. Adding a second set fixed that and prolonged the game.

While these nuts and bolts are probably too big to technically give my son the fine-motor experience he needs, they definitely provided a little afternoon fun!

Spinning a Spider Web

It’s late summer and the spiders are out in full force. To learn a little about these amazing eight-legged creepy crawlies, I hit the library and checked out Dana Meachen Rau’s Spin, Spider, Spin. This simple non-fiction book was a breeze for my son to read and taught us some interesting facts about arachnids (did you know they have eight legs AND eight eyes?!? YIKES!). After my son finished the book, I told him that it was time to spin his web.

I gathered the following supplies:

Old bulletin board (a few plies of corrugated cardboard would suffice)

Push pins

White school glue

Yarn

Waxed paper

Print-out of a spider web (I used this one.)

2 Pipecleaners

I put the spiderweb print-out underneath a sheet of waxed paper on top of the bulletin board and told my son to add push pins wherever the lines intersected, but not push them down all the way.

Then I watered down some white school glue and dipped the yarn in it. Then he wound the sticky yarn around the pins in spiral. Lastly, we added straight pieces of gluey yarn radiating out from the center. Then we waited. And waited. And waited.

The next morning, I removed the pins and used an aluminum grill spatula to gently detach the (now stiff) yarn from the waxed paper. Our web was complete!

Later that day, my son made a spider to go with his web out of two pipecleaners (I helped a little). We followed this amazing YouTube tutorial.

Now I have spiders outside and (one) inside the house, too!