Many Manipulatives

We are using a combination of manipulatives that I have ordered (more age appropriate) and ones that I used in my kindergarten classroom (I will be adapting the use of these ones). 

 

Here Amelia is filling out her Daily Planner. We work on Day, Month, Date, Season, Weather, Feelings, and Activities.

Alphabet Bean Bags: Example Activity: "This is the letter 'f'. F says 'fffff'. Frog starts with the letter 'Ff'." This is what we do for each bean bag....work on letter recognition, letter sound and what begins with that letter. Then Mia gets to throw the bag....her favorite part...that and making the animal sound (if there's an animal pictured on the bag)!

Animal Crack-Ups...an educational spin on Animal Crackers! These work on color recognition, animal recognition and fine motor skills!

After the bean bags and animal crack-ups, we finished our morning with the linking cubes. We focused on sorting colors, counting, and making patterns. Here Mia is checking out my pink and white pattern (also known as: a-b-a pattern)! 

Today seemed like a buggy kind of day! We started out with our Number Bugs! These little guys focus on colors and counting! The number on the bug's head matches how many spots are on the bug's body.

So to work on connecting numerals with the spots on the bugs, I would point out the number, we would count the spots together and then I would have Mia kiss the bug however many times that was indicated on the bug =) She LOVED this!

Rain Pegs with Farm Mat. There are a multitude of activities you can do with this =)

These color pegs coordinate with the color of the food on the mat. The then Amelia started to get bored...time to move on!

For our last activity I was just going to have Mia sort the bugs by either kind or color...but I thought these attribute cards would be fun....and boy did Amelia enjoy them! 

 At first I encouraged Amelia to just match the color-not caring the type of bug. But she soon realized the difference and started to match color and type of bug!

Creating A-B-A patterns again!

This evening Amelia played with the Farm Animals and look what she did (with no encouragement from me). Looks like we have been paying attention to Noah's Art Story.

Here Amelia is sorting fruit.

 Now she is sorting transportation. First, we did by color...then by type of vehicle.