Numbers and Letters Week: Day 1 & 2

January 31, 2019 /
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We’ve been having lots of fun with our numbers and letters this week! As much as we’ve been enjoying our theme library – we’ve also been trying some fun new activities or old favorites redesigned to incorporate our theme. Below are a few of our favorites from the first two days!

Letters:

Alphabet Soup

This is such a great and easy sensory activity to set up – you could use with whatever sensory material you like! A simple redesign of our classic search and find puzzle pieces to complete the puzzle which you can do with sand, rice, dry beans, play-doh (or more liquid sensory if you’ve got plastic pieces), but we used some dry pasta for our soup so it was as simple as putting it in the tray and adding the letters. Some were harder to dig out then others and they loved playing with the “soup” even after completing all the letters and putting them back in the puzzle. It was just a fun way to incorporate more letters into everyday play activities.

Bumble Bee B’s

This is a great activity that I’ve been doing for several years now started back when I was assisting teaching preschool! I was reminded of it again with our alphabet insect book that the kids have been enjoying to pieces. This particular letter idea is such a fun project that really gets kids familiar with one specific letter. We start off talking about the letter B and all the things that start with that sound – print out visuals and/or objects from your toy box/house are super helpful here! Then I show the kids the letter B I had cut out of construction paper and ask them to create their own bumble bee! It helped that we had a little bumble bee puppet as part of our inspiration – but most kids seem to recognize bees at an early age. We used leftover take out chopsticks to create black stripes (I think paint brushes would have made this a lot easier for the littler ones) then added construction paper wings I had previously cut out! I also had some left over pipe cleaners to use as antennae but again paper would suffice if you’d rather use what you’ve got! We were going to end here but my kids decided their Bee’s needed eyes so we added our googly eye stickers too. Although how much they look like a bee really depends on the age and skill of your toddler it’s a fun project either way and I love the way they each made them their own!

Numbers:

Beginning math concepts doesn’t have to be as complicated and frustrating as you remember doing math in school, there are so many ways to play and learn that your kids (and even you) will learn to enjoy Math play.

Counting Towers

For many of these activities you don’t even need to buy or spend a lot of time prepping so they are easy activities to just start up in the middle of a crazy day. For example lego towers – build lego towers with differing number of blocks and try to line them up so each one has one more then just count! Or set out a number (we set this up with numbered duplos) and have/help them build a tower that many blocks high! It doesn’t have to be legos, any kind of block, popbeads, rings or even chunky puzzle pieces will work – anything that can be stacked or added together. The possibilities are endless. Of course there are excellent pre-made games for this too such as this lovely wooden Melissa & Doug counter/matching toy which my kids have enjoyed immensely, but as with most things toddlers are just as happy to invent it themselves as have a toy.

Counting Squares

Another fun numbers activity that was very simple to set up was using squares of construction paper with different numbers on them and helping the kids stamp and count the number of stamps they put on each one. One cow on #1, two bunnies on #2 etc. we then put them in order so we could count up! This was our first time using real stamps that needed a stamp pad (versus once that are pre-inked) so it was a little tricky but they did a great job as we counted together and we managed to get one set out of the three of them that we were able to see the clear number of stamps! Give it a few tries while your little ones get the hang of it! You could also try this with stickers or dot art to expand and extend the activity!

Numbers & Letters Week: Days 3, 4, & 5
Numbers & Letters Week

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