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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 occurred 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.
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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 🙂
Such a great idea! Love your beautiful photos and learning activities. Pinning this.