developing literacy and math skills through play

 

 

Bear {4 yrs} is often resistant to learning activities if i call them "learning activities".  therefore, i have to creatively disguise learning as a game.  don't get me wrong, i believe that learning activities should be fun.  but had i even mentioned the word "learn" before we started playing this, he wouldn't have wanted to play it.

 

we have these colored phonics tiles that i bought at the dollar store before i was even pregnant.  for some reason, i never used them in my pre-K classroom.  they've been a favorite toy for Bear for quite some time.  mostly they are pretend bricks or dirt that he uses in truck play.  so i took that premise and added a bit of math skills (color matching) and literacy (letter identification). 

 

we actually had started out just playing with the tiles, loading and unloading them into the dumptruck. 

 

but after a while, it occured to me that i could turn it into a learning activity.  so we started sorting out all of the tiles by color and dumping them in something that was a corresponding color.  Bear placed them in a pile, i scooped them up with the front-end loader, and he helped dump them out.

 

blue tiles in a blue dumptruck

  

green tiles in a green basket

as we worked, i randomly found tiles that went together to create words.  examples are z + oo = zoo, b + in = bin. 

overall it was a really fun activity, and he never knew that he was learning :)

 

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