The weather here has been too cold to be out for too long so we’ve been tucking into [tag]play activities[/tag]. Our current favourite comes from the archives of January 10th 2007. 11 fun kid activities to do at Grandma’s house.
Post it notes
* Draw a series of pictures or the entire alphabet on separate post it notes; the more the merrier. Do this with your child. Let them give you ideas or draw them.
* Walk around the house and post them at their level everywhere.
* Return to a central point- couch sounds a good place .
* Say, point, draw, show from a book, and ask them for one of the objects or letters. Choose what’s appropriate according to their ability.Where is it? They’ll hopefully tell you a place.
* Off they go and search for it. Up and down, in and out.
* This game can take a long time. I suggest you don’t mix things up too much otherwise you’ll be searching around for ages with your annoyed child trying to find it when they can’t.
* They bring you the [tag]post it notes[/tag]. You compare drawings, picture or symbol to check it’s correct. This is a perfect game for cooperation. You can go and find all/some of the objects/pictures sometimes.
Guaranteed to wear them out if they can’t go outside to let off steam (because it’s a rainy day, too cold, apartment, too dark etc)
These are some new variations we like to play now in 2008……….
Variation: My children both got post-its with their initial on them in their stocking for Christmas. I go around the house and ‘plant’ 4 or 5 for the youngest and a bit more for the oldest, at their heights. They run around and try to collect just their initial. Easier for some than others….
In the spirit of cooperation the youngest will bring his brother’s so it’s not really a race much to the oldest annoyance. After all he knows at 4 what his initial is but the youngest is just trying to be helpful. 🙂 Once found, they have been resticking them back to the pad for another day.
Variation 2: Add upper and lower case letters. We started with Aa on all post its but now we separate the upper and lower case sets. Sometimes we mix them and sometimes we just use one case. We started the upper case in the red stickies and the lower in the yellow. But once we got the hang of it we just use one colour. This one is much too hard for the little one to play. He just collects the red ones or the yellow ones……….or what he pleases.
There are so many more activities you can do the most important thing for us is to keep it simple, fun and to stop when we’ve had enough. It’s a great reinforcement activity if you are looking at the [tag]alphabet[/tag] with your preschooler/ Kindergartener but we [tag]play[/tag] for burning off energy, mostly with the added bonus of recognising parts of the alphabet or laughing at mum’s terrible pictures of objects.
Fun +laughter + learning = a winning combination.
**What post it note sticky games do you play? Always looking for new variations.**
Thanks for contributing this post to this week’s Carnival of Family Life, hosted at A Child Chosen. The Carnival will be live on Monday, February 5, 2008, so I hope you and your readers will stop by and check out all of the fabulous entries included this week!
Thanks for joining in the Unplugged Project this week. Your post-it note idea is similar to our Alphabet Scavenger Hunt. I like all your variations. Great ideas!
I really like the sticky note idea. My daughter is into learning her letters, so this would be a great activity!
Thanks for joining in the rainy day activities linky, that sounds good fun and easy too 🙂
We go through a lot of post its in this house. So handy. Grab them when they are on sale.
Sounds a good idea especially as I’m teaching my 4 year old the alphabet. Thank you.
anything fun and active was always a hit with my boys and the alphabet. They weren’t so keen on the traditional methods for ages. We talk a lot about it here and on the podcast.