Valentine’s Day Card Learning Activities
17 Olympic Themed Activities for Kids
Crafts
The Olympic torch above was made by sponge painting various shades of red, yellow, orange and black paint. My son loved marching around the living room with it during the opening and closing ceremonies.
A paper towel wrapped around a kitchen spoon was another fun way we explored painting. It was supposed to look like an Olympic torch.
Food Creations
Olympic Symbols Bento Lunch displays various finger foods created to look like the Olympic rings, torch, and victory wreath.
Learning Activities
Printable Olympic Passport with Learning Activities shares various ways a passport I created can be used to help children work on writing, researching, and pretend play. The ways you can use the passport are endless. I bet you can come up with several of your own.
Threading felt leaves onto a pipe cleaner is a great fine motor activity. It also creates a fun laurel wreath for your little Olympian.
Olympic Themed Graphs and Charts features seven different charts, graphing sheets and diagrams that children can used during the Olympics or leading up to them.
Olympic Values
This series was a lot of fun to write and I think it was a lot fun for you to read.
The first post in the series was called Olympic Values: Respect and focused on self respect and knowing one’s limit.
The second post was called Olympic Values: Growing Excellence and was about doing your best.
The final post in the series looks at the Olympic Values: Friendship and I talked about JDaniel’s working on making new friends.I hope you find an idea among these 17 Olympic Activities for Kids.
New Year’s Customs Sheet and Activities
It is fascinating to explore the customs and traditions people celebrate during New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day around the world. I made a New Years Customs Page that shares what people do to celebrate around the world. The customs sheet could be read and discussed or it could become part of a learning activity that you could do at home or with your students at school.
What activities could you do with the New Year’s Customs Sheet?
Red Suitcase Craft– Cut out each custom square and glue it to a red construction paper suitcase. The squares will look like the old fashioned travel stickers people used to put on their suitcases long ago.
Concentration Game- Print out two sheets of the New Year’s Customs Sheet. Then cut out each customs. Place 18 custom pieces upside down and search for the matches.
Custom Puzzle Match-Print out a New Year’s Customs sheet. Cut each custom piece into two sections. The top section should contain the picture and part of the world that celebrates that custom. The bottom section should contain the custom. The cuts can be made with various styles of jagged edges. Then try to match custom to its picture like a puzzle.
Guess the Custom Game- After reading over each custom, have one person describe one of the pictures and everyone else can guess what the custom is.
Pictionary Custom Game- Cut out each custom from the New Year’s Eve Custom Sheet and place them in a stack. Take turns selecting a custom from the stack and illustrating it. Everyone else tries to guess what custom is being illustrated.
I bet you can find more ways to this New Year’s Customs Sheet. If you do, please leave a comment below sharing your idea.
Happy New Year!
{Christmas Ornament Activity} Positional Words
As you get ready to put away our ornaments, you may want to try this activity. It asks children to place objects in an ornament storage frame based on position words that I wrote on index cards. Non-fragile ornaments in our Christmas ornament collection worked out best for us. Many of them are ones that JDaniel made himself.
What relative positions are on the cards?
There are words like:
·Above
·Below
·Beside
·In front of
·Behind
·Next to
·To the left of
·To the right of
How do you play?
· Place one of the ornaments in the center of the storage grid.
· Turn one card at a time.
· Place an ornament in the position called for on the card.
· When you turn over the next card, you can decide if you are going place next ornament
by the first ornament or the second.
·Continue placing ornaments until every section of the storage grid is filled.
Working with position words and manipulatives is a core skill. I think I saw a similar activity done using a worksheet. Using objects and a cardboard grid seemed like it would be more fun. We really enjoyed it. In fact, we had to take out the ornaments and do the activity again. Working on relative position trumped getting the ornaments cleaned up.
Decorating Gingerbread Activity
Gingerbread men design activity came to mind as a traced cookie cutter shapes to make the number tally math matching activity. There had to be another way to use our Christmas cookie cutters. When we went to a big box craft store recently, JDaniel just had to visit the Crayola aisle. I had told him that all of our crayons were Crayola and he has since decided that he wants to learn about what other products that they make. It was while visiting the Crayola aisle that he noticed Model Magic. He hasn’t ever used it and thought it sounded like fun. I decided it sounded like fun too and I ended up buying a couple of packages of light brown for a gingerbread activity.
Creating Gingerbread Activity
Cookie cutters and creating gingerbread men with Model Magic just seemed to come together as an idea on our way home. I didn’t tell him what I was thinking, though. The brown modeling dough was pushed into cookie cutters and set out to dry without a word to him.
On Saturday I set out the dried gingerbread men and various odds and ends that could be used to decorate and redecorate them. JDaniel’s eyes lit up. He was really surprised.
I had made holes in the gingerbread men with the end of a pencil thinking the odds and ends would fit into them. Some of the odds and ends ended up being a little too big. Thankfully the Model Magic has some give to it. JDaniel was able to push in the buttons when he wanted too.
He made all different kinds of gingerbread men that day. Some had button eyes and others had stars in their eyes. The rubbery dough held up despite the number of times it was used.
Creating shaped Model Magic creation spaces was so easy to do and JDaniel seemed to enjoy the gingerbread men design activity. We will have to make some using our other cookie cutters for other holidays.
{Christmas Math Activity} Number Tally Match
How to Put Together This Christmas Math Activity
I placed numbers on several brown cookie shape cutout I made by tracing the outline of cookie cutters. I then outlined the shapes with white crayon to create a frosting like edge. Several paper cut outs were made of each shape. I placed a set of tally marks on one of each shape. Various numbers were placed on the remaining cutouts of that shape. Only one of the numbers matched the one with the tall marks.
We placed foil on a old cookie tray and the matching started. It look a little bit of time to sort through the numbers. Once the number cookies had been laid out, he quickly matched them.
JDaniel is now five and in kindergarten. Young children would probably have found this more challenging. What he and I both worked on with this activity verbally explaining why the numbers matched. I just love to hear how he explains things. He was able to explain how each stick represents a part of the number. The total number of sticks equals the whole numberWhen we had finished matching cookies, I had him put them in number order from the biggest number to the smallest. Then we arranged the numbers in reverse.
The number cookies with both numeral and tally mark displays could be used in many other ways.
- Sort even and odd numbers
- Create addition sentences
- Create subtraction sentences
- Play “I Spy The Number”
- Show me the number before
- Show me the number after
You will find this Christmas math activity and many more on my Early Learning Math board on Pinterest.
How else could I use these number cookies?
Spider Letter Swat- Alphabet Activity
Recognizing letters and their sounds is so important when you are learning how to read. This spider letter swat was made to give my son practice in letter sounds and share words that begin with those letter sounds. This was made for Halloween, but I think it could be used in a spider learning unit any time of the year.
Making the Spider Letter Swatter
- The first thing you need to do to make the spider is to gather the materials. You will need a plastic lid a little larger than than swatter, a bug swatter, a pipe cleaner, two large wiggly eyes and a black plastic trash bag.
- I cut a four strips out of the plastic bag for the spider’s legs.
- The strips were the woven through the slits in the swatter. I tried to space the legs three rows apart.
- Two holes were placed in the plastic lid and a small section of the pipe cleaner was placed through the holes.
- The lid was then attached to the fly swatter by putting the ends of the pipe cleaner through to holes in the fly swatter in the same row. The end of the pipe cleaner were then twisted down to hold it in place.
- A rectangle the length of the head of the fly swatter was cut out of the bottom of the plastic bag. By cutting it at the bottom you have two rectangles attached in the middle.
- The plastic bag cutout was placed over the fly swatter with the creased area from the bottom of the bag at the top.
- The plastic bag needs to be pulled tight and secured at the base of the flapper or head of the fly swatter with a small section of the pipe cleaner. We just wrapped the pipe cleaner around and around a few times.
- Then attach the eyes to the spider’s head. You can place them any where on the head that you want to.
Alphabet Activity
When you have created your spider swatter, you are ready to play the alphabet game. We played a couple of versions of this game. The first was to say the letter and what sounds it can make. I stuck with the sounds you hear when you first say the letter sounds. (Some letters make more than one sound. I didn’t really get into that.)
The second version of the game called for saying a word that starts with that letter sound. We both took turns trying to come up with as many words as we could for each letter. I tried to stick with coming up with new words that JDaniel might not have heard before. It was an attempt to increase his vocabulary at the same time that we work on letter sounds.
The third version of the game was trying to come up with words that end with each of the letters. This was little bit of a challenge, but we were both up for a challenge.
Do You Have Other Spider Ideas?
We have talked about spiders a lot on this blog. We made a spider web trellis in our backyard. There was a spider web themed muffin tin lunch. A math game used rubber spiders and pumpkin seeds.
Book That You Could Read and Explore
The link below is an affiliate link.
Halloween Bugs: Halloween Bugs (David Carter’s Bugs)is a really special flap book. It is filled with little doors that creepy crawling bugs hide behind. My son loves to guess what is behind each door. I think younger children will be filled with excitement as each door is opened.
This is the kind of book that you might want to read is a fun voice. I love reading it that way.
You will find more early learning activities on my Early Learning Pinterest board.
Do you swat spiders or just enjoy watching them weave their webs?
Corn Maze- Math Activity
We will be walking through a full-size corn maze when we go to the pumpkin patch until then we have small corn maze math activity in our backyard. It doesn’t have any dead ends or twists to it. It is a simple avenue of corn that we can walk through.
Our corn maze is simply construction paper husks of corn placed on stakes. (The stakes have been collected over time. Our lawn care company places them in our front yard along with a placard with their company name on them. We keep the stakes and pitch the placards.)
I placed a wide variety of numbers on the corn cobs. JDaniel is working on the numbers 1-100 at school this year. I picked numbers that are all over that range.
We then planted the corn husks back onto the stakes. I should have laminated them. The construction paper started to crease a little when we put the corn back on the stakes.
As we walked through the corn this time I asked JDaniel to tell me the numbers that came before and after each number on the corn. This took a little longer and required a little thought. Simply recalling the number had been much easier. This required visualizing the number and then the numbers that appear around it. Moving up to a new level in the higher levels of thinking was a good brain stretcher for him
The last time through the numbers I had JDaniel tell the number in the ones and ten places in each number. I think understanding what makes a number a number helps children bring meaning to the number. This wasn’t that difficult for him. I didn’t think it would be. The goal of was to help him start to build up the number sense compartment of his brain.When he learns expanded notation in school, knowing how many tens and ones a number has will be helpful.
Sight Word Game – Apple Tree Words
He gave me a look like more sight words. Yes, we have been working on sight words a lot this fall. JDaniel is learning some of them at school and we have been working on some at home. We have worked with them several different ways. There has been sight word snacks and sight word eye charts to name a few. Apple Tree Words gave him a chance to play a game that required him to get up and move.
Sight Word Game – Apple Tree Words
I found some apple cutouts in my fall folder of ideas. ( I love when I find treasures like that.) On each of the apples, I placed a sight word. The apples were then mounted onto a blank index card. The cards had holes punched into them and ribbon placed through the hole.
JDaniel’s favorites are the one and two letter words. He went for those first.Word after word came down from the tree. There were only a few words that gave him any trouble. He actually ended up having to capture each word between his fingers and reading it.
The one thing that I didn’t plan for in this sight word game was that JDaniel might try to pull the apple tree words down instead of trying to slip the ribbons off the branches. Thankfully the tree we used for the apple tree word sight word game has flexible limbs. When he pulled the words down the limp bowed down and let the word’s ribbon slip right off.
Fire Ladder Learning Activities
Pretend Play
Number Recognition
Counting On
Math Facts
If you want to work on subtraction facts, you could move down the ladder instead of up or by taking steps backwards.
Sight Words
Conclusion
Other Fire Themed Learning Posts On This Blog
Fire Safety Themed Learning Activities
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- …
- 20
- Next Page »
