Math Playdate

The other day we went to a Math Playdate. All the toys that were out had something to do with math and all the moms went to each math station with their children to help, it was alot of fun. We started out the playdate by reading Ten Apples Up on Top by Dr Suess.

There was a tangram station, great for matching shapes and shape recognition.

Counting beans station, great for counting practice, fine motor skills, and number recognition.

Sorting bears station, great for color recognition and matching.

A number writing station, great for number recognition, fine motor skills, and early writing practice. There was alittle paint inside large ziplock bags and the kids wrote on it with q-tips! This was a SUPER FUN station!


Sticker counting station, great for fine motor skills, number recognition, and counting practice.

Number game station, great for large motor skills, hand eye coordination, and number recognition, some of the older kids also used this for beginning addition practice.

MTM- Dice Game

A LONG time ago a MTM participator shared this awesome dice game. I have been wanting to do this dice game with my kiddos ever since and FINALLY did it today since there was no theme for Muffin Tin Monday.

This is how you play the game. The green dice tells which number tin to eat out of and the blue dice tells how many items to eat. Roll the dice and enjoy! (PS, I wrote on my tins with an expo marker and it came right off.)

1 raisins
2 honey roasted peanuts
3 oyster crackers
4 marshmallows
5 honeycomb cereal
6 chocolate chips

This was a very fun way to do math and eat snack at the same time.

Aidman LOVED this game!

It was a little difficult for my 4 year old to keep track of which dice told what to do, she did much better with just one dice and just picked which tin she wanted to eat out of and counted out however many the dice told her to.

Playing IS Learning

I LOVE LOVE LOVE to walk in on my children to see learning in action.

Here Aidman brought me all his baseball cards that he sorted by looking at the pictures. I LOVED his categories: hitting a baseball, pitcher, catcher, and just a picture.


Here Aidman sorted a bunch of his cars into different groups.

As you can see, Aidman really likes to sort things. It does give you insight to his personality, everything has to be the way it's supposed to be with him.

Dd Activities

Dominoes. They stood them up.

And matched them up.

Dice. Every time they roll a number they mark/graph it on the chart with a bingo dobber.

Dinosaurs. This is a game, but we did not follow the instructions, we played it more like a puzzle.


Funny that all of this weeks activities ended up being math related.

Jars, Jugs, and Jellybeans

I have TONS of jars! It's because my Granny in TN loves to can food from her garden and send it to me. Luckily, we love everything she sends.

Today, I got out jars of all sizes and lids to match and let the kids have at it.

Then I filled a milk jug about half full and let the kids pour water into the jars.

We decided to put food coloring in the jars to make it pretty. Aidman is stirring to mix it in.


Then we tapped on the jars with a spoon to hear the different sounds they made.

Look how pretty! It sounded pretty too!

Afterwards, we dumped the water into a pitcher and then into ice cube trays. Tomorrow we will play with the green ice.

Next time I will add blue food coloring to one kids and yellow to the others so that it will make green when mixed together.

For snack time we had Jelly beans! I gave each child an empty applesauce container filled with jelly and an empty container. I asked each child to guess how many jellybeans they had. Then we counted the beans.

We were so surprised that Aidman and Lyssy had the same amount of jellybeans.

Before eating, they had to graph all of their beans. Needless to say, it was a FUN snack time.

Seashells from the Seashore

Aidman has been really into shells lately. On Sunday he collected an entire bucket of shells at the beach. Today he sorted them into about 5 different groups. Then I sat down with him and showed him more differences between the shells and we ended up with 10 different types of shells. We found this website and Aidman held the shells up to the computer screen to figure out the names of each shell. I then wrote the names of the shells on a sentence stripe and taped a shell to it so that we could always identify them.

Then Aidman wanted to sort the shells again by putting them on the sentence stripes, Lyssy had fun doing it too.

Then I asked them if they wanted to make chimes with their shells. I had seen this at Read 'Em and Leap and thought it was super cute. The only problem we had was that after it dried, our washable tempera painted flaked off the bowl while I was trying to tie on the strings.

The thing that surprised, impressed, and made me proud the most was that all of this AWESOME learning was prompted and led by Aidman, but I guess the best learning is always child led.

Numbers MTM

The theme for today's Muffin Tin Monday is Numbers. We decided we would do alittle counting and number recognition practice. I put a pile of numbered cards on the table and told each child to get a certain color.

Then they had to count each food item and put the correct number card in the muffin cup.

This activity was too easy for Aidman (would have been better with higher numbers for him), but was perfect practice for both of the girls who just turned 3.

We had 1 carrot, 2 oranges, 3 slices grilled cheese, 4 sugar snap peas, 5 gummie bears, and 6 peanuts. It was a yummy lunch!

Tt Table Top Toys

This is another week that had a ton the table top toys that go with the letter of the week, which is Tt.

Here is Lyssy weighing teddy bears, as you can see she also decided to do a few other things with them.

Putting toothpicks in a parmesean shaker is great for fine motor skills.

We also had tracing. Aidman made this great truck.

I had all these shapes ready for the kiddos to trace.

Tracing has been Lyssy's favorite table top activity this week.

I also put out triangles and glue to make art with.

We counted to Two, Ten, Twelve, and Twenty with toothpicks.

Here is Aidman "blowing out the candles".

Lyssy is tonging teddy bears.

In Order

Yesterday we practiced putting things in Order. We had some sequencing cards (which comes first, girl cooking, eating, or washing dishes, sort of thing) that we did for awhile. Then mama came up with the idea of putting numbers in the correct counting order.

I gave Aidman Popsicle sticks 1-10 and Lyssy 1-5 to put in order.

They liked it so much that they wanted to put their names in Order!

It was cute to see them get excited about coming up with their own game.

Happy Easter

I hope everyone had as Happy an Easter as we did! We started off by going to church and afterwards had an egg hunt at church.


We got a couple pictures all dressed up. I am so using this for my#3 of 52 weeks post for Forever In Blue Jeans because let's face it, it takes work to get a picture of mommy each week. And yes, my kiddos are going to be horror stricken when they are grown and look back at pictures from Easters past because yes indeed that is in fact a boobie about to pop out of the dress (of course daddy didn't tell mommy, because he liked it too much!).

After church Granny, Papa, Aunt Britt, and Cody came over. We dyed Eggs, went on an egg hunt (the kiddos even got a chance to hide the eggs once), played the fun games from the Easter Basket, and had a wonderful dinner!

In our baskets we got a new Bible to share, a set of 4 mommy made bean bags, and mommy a made game, and 5 eggs with some candy.

The games are from and idea inspired from Mind Games. I took a shower curtain liner ($2) and cut it in half. Then I traced circles with a bowl (just bigger than a cd). For Aidman's I wrote an alphabet letter in each, there were 55 circles so upper and lower of each plus extra lower of a, e, i. For Lyssy's I wrote a number in each, 0-9. This game can be played like twister, or with bean bags tossed on the letters/numbers, or my jumping on them. I like it because the difficulty can be increased with the progress of the child. Right now we are working on recognition, later we can use it to spell words or do addition/subtraction/multiplication (actually, today Aidman tossed a bean bag on each letter of his name in order, so he's already using it for spelling).