Buses, Bunnies and Keys

We get so many fun math manipulatives in our monthly Mother Goose Time kits.  Miss M loves to play with them so I came up with some new fun games for her to play while working on colors, number identification, counting and classifying.

Recently, she has been loving playing with the keys we got during our June theme so I made up a simple house picture in Photoshop (trying clicking on it at the bottom and let me know if you can print it) and printed it on colored paper that coordinated with the colors of keys.  I cut them out, wrote numbers on them and set up a little "town" in the living room.  The buses we got a few months ago are also in the same colors as the keys (except for orange) so we got those out too.  I had her pick a bus and drive it to a matching house.  Then she had to identify the number written on that house and use that many keys to unlock the door so the bus could get inside.  There are only four of each color of key but I had higher numbers on some of the houses so she had to figure out how many more she needed in a different color to unlock the door.  Simple but she loved it.  Littlest liked trying to match the buses to the houses, too.

I used the same houses, keys and buses and added the rabbits from another kit (also in the same colors) for another game today.  We set up our neighborhood, dumped all the buses and rabbits on her "sleigh" (a paper plate with yarn threaded through it for a handle) and she got to be Santa, delivering toys to the houses.  This time she shook two dice (I put them in a plastic baby food container and she rolled them in there, to keep them contained), counted the number she got and then found the house with that number on it.  She chose a matching key, unlocked the door and then gave the house the same number of gifts as its "address".  For numbers under 4, she tended to give all of one item in the color that matched the house.  For some of the bigger numbers, she had to mix and match.  This is where the classifying came in.  She could choose to use all the same color of buses and rabbits, all one type of toy in different colors or even sort by size (the rabbits come in large and small).  She liked sorting them into groups and counting out the right number for each house.

I really enjoy making up new activities with the materials we receive every month.  I will try to share more of those ideas in the future.