Today I wanted to share one of my favorite ways to introduce numbers and numeracy concepts with young children.  It’s a mix between show and tell and math time.  I figured the best way to show you what I mean would be to make a video.  Here I’ll show a lot of different options for using the number bag or math bag.  You DON’T need to do them all in one sitting, I just wanted you to see all the different concepts you can teach with one type of activity.

What I love most about this activity is that it gets the kids to see numbers and math concepts as they relate to real objects they have a real interest in.  Suddenly, math isn’t something you do just with the math manipulatives, but with everything around you!

Here’s the Number Bag Information Sheet you would want to include in your folder inside the bag.  Along with it, you’ll want some number cards.  If you don’t already have some, the easiest way to create these is to get some index cards, write the number on one side and then attach the corresponding number of dot stickers (from the office supply aisle) on the other side.  Ta-da!  You have a set of number cards for about $1 and 5 minutes.

As a review, here are some of the concepts you can cover with this activity:

Numeral Recognition (Written representation)

Numbers (Names we use for them)

Rote Counting  (Counting in order)

One-to-One Counting (Counting one number for each object)

Comparing – Greater than/Less than (Which is greater/less?  By how much?)

Categorizing and Sorting by Changing Qualifiers (Sorting the same group by big and little, then by hard and soft)

Adding

Patterning

What else could you do with the Number Bag?

As I mentioned in the Playful Learning Spaces Giveaway (and yes, there’s still a little time left to enter) there is a strong impact in a thoughtfully prepared space.  If you want your children to be playful, it helps to create an environment that invites children to play.  I can think of few invitations to play that are more compelling than a special space like a tent or a hideout.  You can set one up, say nothing, and almost instantly you’ll have children dragging blankets and animals in for a jungle tea party, darting in and out as they dream up dramatic adventures, or cozied up inside with a good book.

They’re the perfect prop for encouraging dramatic play and all its benefits, and the subject of many memorable scenes from our childhoods.

Here are a few ideas for tents, forts, and hideouts you might want to create with the children you love and teach:

I am a huge fan of these A-frame pup tents from Lindsay & Drew and keep trying to convince my handy husband that he really wants to make some with me for our boys.  I keep picturing them lined up in our playroom, out in our yard, and on the beach at the lake, with our giddy boys running between them.  They look quite simple to make and easy to store, transport, and set up.

If you’re a fan of the card table hide-outs, and feel a bit crafty, you can find a darling pattern from Empty Bobbin Sewing, here.  Or for those happy to pick them up ready-made, you may want to peruse Miss Pretty’s etsy shop.

For a similar style, you could also try this ingenious take by ikat bag where she makes a simple play house using tension rods and a hallway.  Taking out the angles and keeping it to straight stitches — that’s my sewing style.  The decorations may have to be hot glued felt at our house or drawn on by the kiddos themselves!

If you like to keep things a bit less ornate, you might love this PVC Pipe Playhouse from Angry Julie Monday.  (Ah, PVC pipes!  Takes me back to my college landscaping days!)  She gives measurements and instructions for creating a frame from PVC pipes (be sure to mark your cut pipes so you can easily put it together each time) and then you can simply drape it with blankets and sheets to create the perfect fort.

Of course, my husband (as he peaks over my shoulder) says all of this is cheating.  “Blankets and books,” he says, indicating his old-school rules.  In fact, he did just rig one up a month or so ago, draping a large blanket from under the top bunk mattress and across the floor, anchored with books at the bottom.  I’ll have to snap a picture next time.  The boys loved it, though it was a bit delicate for wiggly boys and had to be reset a few times before they simmered down and went to sleep.

There is huge value in having kids rig up their own forts with open-ended materials.  Plenty of creativity, math, science, and problem-solving involved!  You can encourage that by creating fort kits to have at the ready. Check out this Fort Building Kit from Meg and Andy Made (pictured above)  based on this post at Saltwater Kids.  (What a great birthday present idea!)

I hope that’s given you some inspiration!  If nothing else, grab a few kitchen chairs and some blankets, and build a fort today!

On this Mother’s Day weekend, I wanted to share a post that is particularly tender for me.  My husband’s cousin wrote The Gift of Motherhood about my sister-in-law who, after being diagnosed with lung cancer as a 23 year-old non-smoker, miraculously became a mother.  She cherished every moment from her pregnancy through the ten months she was able to physically mother him here on Earth.  Her son is now blessed with both an angel mother who continues to watch over him as well as another amazing mother whose love has been like a salve to so many broken hearts.  This post is a beautiful reminder that motherhood truly is a gift.  Read it here.  (But grab a tissue first.)

Here are some other great reads–

Articles:

How to Miss a Childhood {Hands Free Mama}

Hidden Messages We Don’t Mean to Send Our Children {Janet Lansbury via her new gig at eHow}

Mommy Fun Fact #17: Look kids in the eye.  {A Mom with a Lesson Plan}

Are We Wringing the Creativity Out of Kids? {Mind/Shift — npr}

Activities:

Connect with Your Kids: 50 Screen-Free Activities {Childhood Beckons}

Olympic Crafts: 20+ Crafts, Activities, and Ideas to Inspire {Red Ted Art’s Blog}

How to Set Up Natural Play Spaces in Your Own Back Yard {Modern Parents Messy Kids}

DIY Water Wall {Tinker Lab}

Top Image Source

I hope you all enjoyed the Mind in the Making Read-Along series.  I’m so glad that I read it, and I’m quite confident I’ll be going back to it again and again.

I’m also thrilled that Ellen Galinsky has offered to answer some of the questions you had about the book, and offer more insight into how the book came about, and the hopes she has for its influence.

I found her comments fascinating, and I hope you will too.  The Q&A is broken into three parts (you’ll find them linked below).

Here are some of my favorite excerpts:

On the writing process…

“And then there was my feeling about the way many parenting books do guilt us. Some books that I had read in college and graduate school and had loved before I had my own children, felt different after my children were born. I remember literally throwing one book into the fire because it was such a guilt-trip book.  Who needs that? We want to be inspired, not blamed. We are (unfortunately) far too fast to blame ourselves without needing anyone else to do it.“

On recognizing your child’s “lemonade stands”…

“Being apathetic about everything is learned; it is a response to a situation. I can’t believe that parents haven’t seen a spark of interest somewhere, sometime in their children’s growing up years. I would try to go back to that spark and begin to rekindle it.”

On encouraging kids to take on challenges:

“And we need to let our kids know that making mistakes comes with the territory. If we aren’t making mistakes, we aren’t learning.”

I’d love to hear what comments jump out at you, change your thinking, or inspire you to action. 

Start reading Part 1 HERE.

Intro :: Part1 :: Part 2 :: Part 3

About a year ago I wrote a series of posts about creativity — why it matters for our kids, why it may be disappearing, and what we can do to get it back.  I decided to put the whole series into one downloadable Ebook that you can print or read right from your screen.

Since then, more than 1500 copies have been downloaded.  You can get a copy for yourself.  Just click the button below and you’ll find it in your cart for free!

 Let’s all do our part to protect creativity, curiosity, and play in the lives of the children we love and teach.

Pick up your free copy, take a little time to read it, and then let me know what you think. 

**My distribution service has a daily limit on free downloads, so if you are unable to download today, please come back tomorrow!**

Think about Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori, and Nate Berkus.  How do these three fit in a group?  Each has taught the strong impact of a thoughtfully prepared environment.  Attractive and organized, of course, but it’s not just about aesthetics, it’s also about purpose.

Mariah Bruehl, author of Playful Learning (an amazing resource I highly recommend) as well as the creator of the blog of the same name, is another person I’d put in that group.  She is an amazingly talented educator and mother and a passionate promoter of making learning playful and accessible for children.  (Not to mention the fact that she is a truly delightful and kind-hearted person.)

Mariah truly has a gift for purposeful beautiful preparation of children’s spaces, making them not only appealing to the eye but stimulating to the mind.  She has a way of creating invitations in a space that simply call children over to explore.  Her guidance is valuable to teachers and parents alike.

Starting this week, she’s launched her popular course, Playful Learning Spaces Ecourse on a new platform, allowing you to enjoy the information at your own pace and return as often as you like!

And it gets better.  Mariah is offering a free spot in her course to one of the readers of Not Just Cute!  (Valued at $125)  Just comment below, sharing the space you’d like to better prepare as a playful learning environment, or share a memory of one of your favorite spaces from your own childhood.  A winner will be selected randomly from the comments Tuesday May 15 at 10pm (EST) and posted in next Wednesday’s post.  One comment per person.

In the meantime, peruse Mariah’s site, Playful Learning, and check out all the good stuff her course has to offer!

Mother’s Day is around the corner here in the United States, and whether you’re looking for a project to do on a grand scale with an entire class, or something simple you can create with your own little ones around the kitchen table, there are plenty of ideas to find around the blogosphere.

Here are five of my favorites:

This Lemon Hand Scrub from Under the Table and Dreaming is a treat for Mom’s hands, but also a great measuring and mixing activity that kids can take part in!

I still have memories of making a project similar to these Tissue Paper Flowers from Rust & Sunshine  when I was in school.  It’s a fun and beautiful craft I’ve made with little ones as well.  I worried that separating the layers might be too tricky, but I was pleasantly surprised how gently their little fingers went to work. (Great fine motor practice!)

Whether you’re sending this card home from school or in the mail to Grandma’s house, this I Love You This Much Card from Day In My Life is a fun surprise for anyone on Mother’s Day.  And the accordion folding is great practice for little fingers as well!

With inexpensive washers and a metal stamp kit, you can make beautiful trinkets for a necklace, bracelet, or key chain.  Follow the simple tutorial for this Stamped Necklace from Not So Idle Hands and imprint the discs with words like “Mom”, “Love”, or a child’s name.

And who wouldn’t want to be presented with this Printable from A Proffittable Life ?  Have kiddos decorate their own frames and then slip in this fantastic print for all those best moms in the whole entire history of the world!

What’s your favorite Mother’s Day project for little hands?

Articles:

How to Raise a Responsible Child {A-ha Parenting}

Eight Tips for Reading with a Toddler {Teach Preschool}

Overnight Success: How to Be a More Patient Mom {Motherhood…Your Way}

Introducing the “We Get It” Parenting Series {The Golden Gleam}

Too Many Choices? {Simple Kids}

Activities:

Lock and Key Math Activity {No Time for Flashcards}

Make a Sensory Seek and Find Present {Creative with Kids}

Colored Sand Art {Let’s Explore}

What caught YOUR eye this week?

Image Source

More Information:

Put Ups and Put Downs {Playful Learning}
Playful Learning: Develop Your Child’s Sense of Joy and Wonder {Mariah Bruehl}

While studying seeds, plants and flowers, I love to take a field trip to a beautiful garden.  Unfortunately, my plans to do so recently were vetoed by weather reports for a thunder storm.  So instead, we visited a beautiful greenhouse we’re lucky to have nearby.

To keep things focused, we started with a scavenger hunt.  My little guy was instantly determined to snap a photo of everything on the list!

(You can use this  Printable Greenhouse Scavenger Hunt form you see below, or make your own based on your venue.)

Of course, interest and curiosity took us down some different paths, which is always fine with me!  (I use the scavenger hunt to catch their attention out of the gate, and as a way to redirect if things get too off-task, but I don’t consider curiosity itself to be an off-task behavior.)

We snapped shots of our favorite specimens.

Hydrangeas for me.  (This photo is a perfect souvenir since I can’t seem to keep them alive in real life.)

The Venus Fly Trap for my son.  (Which led to a collection of videos and drawings of the carnivorous plant keeping us busy for several days.)

As if the field trip wasn’t fun enough, we decided to put our photos together into a book.  It’s a great post-field trip activity you can do one-on-one with your child or in a classroom setting.

This is something you can make fancy with a program like Blurb, or take the   slacker easy/inexpensive route like I did and print a few dollars worth of photos at Costco and tape them to printed pages from your computer.  (I simply stapled the pages together and covered the staples with colored duct tape.)

You can make something like this as a dictated story from your child, letting them join you at the computer and watch as you take their spoken words and turn them into print.  (Find tips for doing a dictated story with your child here at Simple Kids.) It’s a great way to build language and literacy skills while reinforcing the experience and the concepts you explored.

You could also use the photos to create a meaningful emergent reader, following a pattern and using simple sentences so that young readers can begin to read independently with just a bit of exposure.  You could also use the opportunity to introduce or practice sight words appropriate to the individual level.   (You can find the Dolch Sight Word Lists here to give you some inspiration for words you may want to focus on and include.)

Whatever purpose you decide to focus on, involving children in creating their own books always fosters their interest in reading.  And interest is always a great place to start with young readers.

Have you made books with the children you love and teach?

Greenhouse Scavenger Hunt Credits: Flower Clip Art, Header Font (@Kevin & Amanda)