Some rainy day learning fun

Rainy afternoons can be down right terrifying when you have little children in the house. The chaos, tantrums and rowdiness is sometimes more than I can bear. So when the weather forecast calls for afternoon thunderstorms stop what you are doing and take a few minutes to work play with your little ones.

Hi Ho Cherry-o is one of my favorite games for toddlers. It covers all the basics, color recognition, sorting, fine motor skills, following the rules, counting and most importantly manners.

Encourage your little one to set up the game without your help. Have them sort the apples, cherries, blueberries and oranges into the matching color basket. Once they have done this have them put the fruit on the matching tree counting as they go. Picking up those tiny fruits and placing them on the tree is great fine motor skill practice and helps them with their coordination and dexterity. Explain the rules of the game and have your little one repeat them back to you. As you take turns spinning be sure to model good manners and taking turns with your little one....and no getting mad when you lose. Because you will lose. My daughter beat me 4 times in a  row! Playing board games often takes a backseat to video games and movies which is a shame because developmentally they play such an important role in your child's development. While technology is great and definitely has its place in the educational world sometimes you need to get back to basics and teach your children through personal interaction and modeling.

Some more of my rainy day favorite activities

Scavenger Hunt: Give your little ones a bucket or a bag and make a few lists. Suggested lists: Things that: are Red, yellow, green, have wheels, are edible, soft, hard, round, square, float, can be used in the kitchen, the possibilities are endless. Write them down on a card and mix all the cards up in a small jar. Have your little one pull out a list and give them 4 minutes to search the house finding items that would match their list. The more they find the more points they get!
Fashion show: Break out the purple eyeshadow and fancy clothes let your little one raid your closet for the perfect high heel shoes and have a fashion show
Design an amusement park: Have your little one get creative with their colored pencils, markers and crayons. Have them draw pools and roller coasters, animal areas and playgrounds. Then give them a box or shopping bag and encourage them to go around the house and find some items they could use to build their amusement park. Work with them to set it up...and let their creativity go wild!
Build a fort: Have your child draw out blueprints for their fort, labeling the parts and making a materials list for what they will need to build it. Then get to work helping them build their fort.
Pillow hop: Have your little one gather all of the throw pillows, if your house is like mine there are plenty to choose from. Arrange them in a row on the floor, practice counting by 1's, 2's, 5's and 10's as they hop to the next pillow.
Puzzles: Having your child put together a 35 piece or higher puzzle is a great way to get their brain working. It challenges them to think, problem solve and use clues to help them solve their problems.

Come and check out our Rainy Day Ideas on Pinterest

Leave a comment and let us know how you spend your rainy days with your little ones. We would love to hear your ideas!

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What to do with all those eggs!

Easter is over, the sugar rush is wearing off and the nagging question arises...
What do you do with all of those plastic eggs?
You have colored ones, sports ones, polka dotted ones, striped ones, large ones & small ones more eggs than you know what to do with. So here are a few ideas to transform those plastic Easter eggs into fun learning games for your little ones both at home and at school. So get your sharpies and your stickers out and get ready to re-purpose those eggs!

Letter Matching

 Use a sharpie to write a lower case letter on the bottom half and and the matching upper case letter on the top half
Little ones will practice matching upper case and lower case letters.

Word Families

 Use a sharpie to write (an, and, am, ot) on the bottom half of the eggs. Write letters on the top half that will spell words that are in the same word family. For example (pan, man, tan, can, fan, ran)

Initial Sounds

 This is a game played like memory, after making the eggs just put them all in a pile for little ones to try to match. You can use small cut out pictures ( like from a magazine) or small plastic toys and small wooden or plastic letters.
For example:
C  in one egg and a plastic cat toy in another
A in one egg and a plastic apple toy in another 
D  in one egg and a plastic dinosaur toy in another
Little ones try to match the item with the initial sound that they hear. This is a great game to play with partners. It is a great review for speech sounds and initial consonants.

You can also use stickers of objects like a flower or a bee and have them match the letter to the sticker showing the initial sound.

Number Words

  Little ones can match the written word (three) to the numeral (3) and for an added bonus put the number of jelly beans inside for them to count so they can build their one to one counting correspondence. Touching each jelly bean as they count them.

 Math Mania

  Little ones match the addition or subtraction problem to the correct answer by matching the egg.

You can use addition. subtraction, multiplication or division problems depending on the age and skill level.

Simply write the problem on one half of the egg and the answer on the other half. separate eggs and have your child or student try to find all the matches. Add a level of difficulty by giving your little ones a time limit. By using a timer it will help them to increase their speed and accuracy.

Compound Words

  Little ones match words up to create compound words (sunshine, rainbow, cupcake, highchair, wheelchair) To enhance their understanding of compound words have them use their new words in a sentence, verbally for your younger ones and written for our older friends.

Egg Sort

  Eggs today have gotten pretty fancy. There are small eggs, large eggs, sports eggs, animal print eggs, metallic eggs,  polka dotted eggs, striped eggs, colored eggs the list could go on and on. Have your little one sort their eggs by patterns, colors sizes etc.

You could even write the color words onto the eggs to start introducing those color sight words or for your older children introduce juicy color words.....like flamingo pink, flaming orange, lemon yellow and sky blue. These descriptive color words will not only enhance their vocabulary it will also help them to be more descriptive in their writing.

How do you reuse your Easter eggs? We would love to hear from you, leave us a comment!

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