Play it Smart and Have a Ball

Today for Play It Smart, I kind of have a mix and match of ideas, but let’s start with this…

Sight words ball:

I just took a $1.50 ball from Walmart, wrote sight words all over it…

And let my boys toss it back and forth. When they caught it, they had to say the first sight word they saw (or the first one they recognized in the case of my four year old who is still learning them).

This next one is also geared toward the kindergarten age range, but is fun for any age.

It’s catch again but with a rhyming twist:

Simply toss a ball and see how many rhymes you can come up with. Of course, this yielded all sorts of nonsense words and laughter, but it there was good rhyming happening too.

That is… when a little ball thief wasn’t trying to take advantage of missed catches. 🙂

*Note: We did these activities last weekend. I have since played the ball games again with Reid and more learning definitely happened when I played with him. 😉 Probably because he took it more seriously with me.

Eventually, we ditched the balls and played a version of Red Light, Green Light or…

Odd and Even:

Instead of red and green we used odd numbers for stop and even numbers for go. It worked great. They picked up the change in rules without missing a beat. It also got violently competitive though, so maybe this isn’t one for siblings? ha. 🙂

I think it would be great to do nouns and adjectives this way for older kids. Oh, or vowels and verbs!

My last idea is for the pool. How about a little…

Diving Ring Math:

We are lucky enough to have a community pool to go to this summer (that opens next week – too excited over here!). So I bought some dive toys to use. The rings are from Walmart and the squids are from The Dollar Tree.

I am sure there are more clever things you could come up with (throw out a bunch of numbers and have them retrieve only even numbers for example…), but I simply encased a worksheet in a plastic, zip top bag, you may need to trim it down to make it fit, and assigned the answers to the dive toys.

You can use masking tape or washi tape and a permanent marker. That makes for a lot of waste though.

So, I tried using a dry erase marker. If your child can avoid touching the writing, it works really great! Even after taking a dunk in water, as long as the numbers weren’t touched, they remained.

You can achieve this same effect with the dive rings by looping some packing tape around a ring. Write the answers on the packing tape in dry erase marker and then erase it as needed.

Or loop the washi tape around the rings. Most preschool worksheets have the same answers over and over again, so you won’t have to change out the tape that often.

Then, have them dive for all the toys and then match the answers to the plastic protected work sheet problems. Easy! 🙂

Oh and I didn’t try it yet, but later found this dry erase crayon. I bet it would be a little more touch resistant and definitely water resistant.

That’s all for today. Come back tomorrow for a great guest and super fun creative writing exercise (I can’t wait!).

And as always. Please comment and/or leave links if you have some great fun learning games to share!