Learning with games

Little W and I spend a lot of our "school" time learning through games. 

In fact, his sweet big sister made him two games that he loves to play.

I love the fact that she takes the time out of her day to do things like this for him. While they argue like cats and dogs at times, moments like these melt my heart.

This dinosaur addition game is a quick favorite now. 

It doesn't take long to play, which is great when you are a busy 3 year old constantly on the go.

The goal is to get your dino to the mommy dino.

Roll the dice, answer an addition question card, and if correct, move the number of spaces on the dice.

Big sister also made this lily pad frog jump game.

Focusing on the word families in,an, ad... he has to match the word on the back of the frog to the correct lily pad.

 He likes it so much he asked his big sis to make him more frogs and lily pads.

I picked up a popcorn word game on zullily last month and while he doesn't want to sit for a full game, he often takes it out and we will play for 10 minutes or so at a time.

 He gets to keep the pieces he can read. On this day he read a handful of sight words before he moved on to his next adventure.

He's been really into what number is "bigger" so we took out the UNO cards and played "have the alligator eat the bigger number"

We had some counting stones available in case he needed to visualize it.

Last week I printed off what I thought would be enough activities to last him a week.

He blew through them all on Monday morning.

I should have been prepared after his sister.

He loves this fall CVC mat that I grabbed from Teacher's Pay Teacher's.

I laminated the cards and he reads the word and then remakes it with the leaves.

A was writing extreamly well by 3, but little W is really just now getting into it. I am providing pleanty of tracing practice and these pumpkin number mats that I laminated have been a hit.

We also used pumpkin cards to work on some simple addition problems.

Since discovering that colors can be mixed to make other colors, W is CONSTANTLY asking what does__________ and _________ make.

I let him explore with red and yellow finger paints to paint a pumpkin.

He loved it. 

Then we all had to finger paint using many other colors.

Even A got into it.

A little more easy addition practice while working on fine motor skills with coloring.

I wrote the problems, W wrote the answers.

Another fun zullily find was this 100 board.

W spent close to an hour playing with this and exploring number patterns.

I love watching his mind work.

We've also been spending a lot of time at the library. Our new town has a great library and we have been going twice a week. Once day a week for story time, and back again at the end of the week to pick out more books.

W read both of these books entirely on his on last week.

The smile on his face says it all!

This age is so fun. Every single thing is new and exciting and the energy is contagious.