Egg Carton Counting

Here is a fun {and inexpensive}way to practice counting and work on find motor skills at the same time.

Here is what you need

1 egg carton
1 bag of small pom poms (or buttons or beans or whatever small thing you want to count) - you need 78
pair of tweezers (I like the gator grabbers)

How to Make

Using a permanent marker write numbers 1 - 12 in the egg cups. 

Pour the poms into the top of the egg carton

Give your little one the tweezers,

How to Use

Using the tweezers count out the pom poms into each egg cup.  Practice counting.  Use the tweezers to work on fine motor skills.  Using the multi-colored pom poms you could also make patterns, or use the colors to point out odds and evens.  

DIY Toy Project: Plastic Lids

Little Dude has a problem with low sodium.  To keep his sodium levels up he takes salt twice a day, eats a salty diet and drinks Gatorade.  A while ago I decided to start saving the lids, thinking there must be some way to reuse them creatively.  We have a lot of lids.

Turn Plastic Lids into fun Learning Tools

This took about five minutes to make and cost me nothing because I had a gift card from one of the big box craft stores.  

Foam Letter Stickers
Plastic Lids

Stick the stickers on the lids.  I just gave them to the Little Dude because he likes to sort, count and organize.  They could also be used as stamps although we haven't yet.

Extra bonus for me. The letter stickers were not completely punched out so there was lot of scrap foam stickers that the Little Dude used to decorate his box.

DIY Toys - The Cardboard Box

When is a box not a box?  When it is in the hands of child.  Then it becomes a train, a racetrack, a sled, a car, a hideout, a dollhouse and anything else they can imagine.

When a big box comes into our lives, generally speaking I just leave it out, they play with it until it is dead, then I recycle it.   No extra instruction necessary, but sometimes it is fun to give their imaginations a boost.
Here are fifteen ways to use boxes (big and small) in play.

1. Put a steering wheel inside (paper plate) and it becomes a car
2. A sled.
3. Cut a hole in the side to make a beanbag toss.
4. Use a tissue box to make an Easter basket.
5. Make monster feet.
6. Use one big, or a whole bunch of small boxes to make a doll house.
7. Draw a road, houses, an airport. Play with toy cars, planes or trains
8. Make a robot
9. Use a whole bunch of boxes, fold out the front and back, connect, and make a human size maze.
10. Glue straws to make a tilty maze for a marble or bouncy ball. 
11. Use little boxes, taped closed, as big building blocks.
12. Make an art gallery.  Either fix the artwork to the box, or just get a bunch of markers a draw right on the box.
13. Make the box a shape sorter for the tots. 
14. Make a puppet theater.  Cut a window out of the side of a big box and fix a curtain of some sort to the inside.  Or build a wall with a bunch of little boxes to hide behind to give a fun puppet show.
15. Doll Bed, either big or small.

Here is an extra bonus.  After your box fun is done you can read Not a Box by Antoinette Portis

This post is a part of 5 Days of Teaching Creatively Blog Hop.  Check out other's posts on Toys, Games and Puzzles by clicking on Blog Hop Linky at the bottom of this post. You can click over to the TOS Review Crew Blog to find out more.  Don't forget to enter to win one of three great homeschool prize packages in the Teaching Creatively Giveaway