Monday, October 10, 2011

Play in the leaves: Easy and fun manipulative play for toddlers and prek!

After making our Autumn Apples themed sensory box, we had a few packages of fake leaves left over.  I had no specific plans for the leftover leaves, so today I decided to pull them out and see where the kids would take them.

Bub has been reviewing his capital and lowercase letters with the "letter sorter" in the Autumn Apples printable set, and wanted to use leaves instead of the printable apples.  So, we wrote the letters he's reviewing on the leaves, some capital letters and some lowercase letters, and he quite happily set to work.  He enjoyed it so much he actually did the same activity three times in a row!


































While Bub was working with letters, the Princess used the leaves in place of number manipulative. With just a little bit of help, she wrote the numbers 1-13 on the leaves, then worked on sequencing them for quite a while. 



























The Princess and Bub both used the leaves to match patterns (also in the printable set).





















Bigger Bit had been putting spaghetti noodles into the holes of a shaker, but quickly decided to forgo the pasta in favor of poking the long leaf stems through the shaker's holes!  It was a bit rough for her, as the stems of the leaves were nearly the same size as the holes, but with some help from Bub, she succeeded! 


Bigger Bit ended the leaf play by sorting the red and yellow leaves by color.


Linking to
abc button Classified: Mom

3 comments:

  1. Ooh what great activities! :) Such a good idea to use leaves to do all of these!

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  2. I hope you didn't get stained like I did one year. I used similar leaves to decorate and apparently was sweating, needless to say the ink got on my hands and then my face when I wiped my face. It took days to come off!! Whoops.

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  3. ah, so much fun with leaves! we have a leaf theme coming and I have been searching for leaves like yours!

    Thank you so much for linking to last week's Sunday Showcase! can't wait to see you share some more ideas on this week's linky - now open!

    Bern
    http://momto2poshlildivas.blogspot.com/search/label/Sunday%20Showcase

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