Measuring Your Hands & Feet

I just found this post from a year ago that never got posted:

We measured our hands & feet today. Did you know there is a whole blog dedicated to crafts with hands & feet?

First we traced Talia & Katrina's feet & hands, then Talia used a measuring tape to measure them.

She learned about:

- where to start with the measuring tape

- how to read it

- how to write some numbers

- how to write the " for inches.

She also continued after we were done by tracing her hand on the other side, colouring it in, measuring it, writing the measurement, and then suggesting that she could cut it out.

Mixing Colours and Melting Ice Cubes

This was a great activity because it touched on science, math, colours, patience, colouring in the lines... and it was totally fun!

How To Do It:

1. Add a drop of food colouring to the water in each ice cube, before freezing. (Talia loved getting to add drops of food colouring by herself)

2. Make a paper with math equations for different colour combinations, leaving an empty spot for the answer. (We took this opportunity to talk about what the "+" and "=" signs mean)

3. The next day, fill glasses with ice cubes in different colour combinations & watch to see what colours they make when they melt! (This was fun but took a while, so we added leftover cubes to cups of water for more food colouring fun while we waited)

4. Let your child colour in the answers when it's all finished.

I got this idea from a blog, but I can't remember where now!

Shape Sorting

We have a shape sorting cube from Playskool called the "Form Fitter".

In the past we've just used it for fitting the shapes through the holes, but I recently found a few of the shapes that were missing, and with all of the blogs I've been looking at lately, I think I'm starting to see things a little differently, because I thought of another "educational" way to approach the toy (it's not that original I guess, but for me it was ;)

So, I suggested different ways that Talia could sort the shapes (by colour, by whether they had corners or were round, by how many sides or corners they had, etc.) It went well & Talia was eager to keep doing it!

Number Wheel

Chasing Cheerios recently shared this Number Wheel from www.homesschoolshare.com

I printed and laminated it & then went to the dollarstore in search of wooden clothespins that I could write on. Instead I found these adorable plastic ones. And you know? I think maybe a little craftiness is rubbing off on me from all of the blogs I've been reading lately, because I thought of the idea all on my own (haha :) to gluegun these foam hearts onto the clothespins since I couldn't write the number on like you could with wooden ones.


I was pretty happy with how they turned out & I'm excited to see what Talia thinks of them. I'm thinking that when she gets tired of using them to count with, I could teach her about odd & even numbers by the white & pink hearts.

p.s. This post was featured on ABC & 123's Teaching Children to Count by 2, 5, 10 post!