Sudoku for Kids

I love magnetic travel games for kids and was super excited when they came out with a magnetic sudoku for kids.  I love to do sudoku puzzles so I have been trying to teach my daughter how to play by creating simple ones and putting them on her dry erase board.  She is picking up the concepts pretty quickly but the problem is that she has not mastered writing numbers so I have to write the numbers in for her.  Right now that is fine because she still needs some help making sure the puzzle is correct but as she gets better my miss-independent girl is not going to like to only be able to play sudoku with mom.  This magnetic sudoku will allow her to play by herself (after I set up the puzzle for her). 

The red backed numbers represent the numbers that cannot be moved and the yellow backed numbers are the ones the kids use to fill in the puzzle.  Instead of going up to 9 like the adult sudoku, the number stop at six so the board is much smaller and the puzzles are easier.  It comes with a booklet of puzzle set-ups and solutions but for starters I recommend creating your own that are super easy.  In the example above I just left one square in each row/column open.  I started teaching her to make sure every row/column had a 1,2,3,4,5, and 6.  Once she mastered this idea, I started showing her that each rectangle (hard to tell in picture but each rectangle is made up of six squares of the same color) also needs to have one of each number.  We are still working on this so the puzzles I create for her now usually still look like the example above plus one more open square so that she has to look at the rectangle along with the rows to figure out which number she needs.

Flash Cards

I love flash cards!  They have great images that grab my daughter's attention.  I enjoy picking up packages that focus on one topic such as Space.  If I had decided to teach my daughter about space on my own I would have taught her about the sun, planets, moon, and maybe the solar system.  With this one set of flash cards that cost $1 at Target she is now learning about things I would never have thought to teach her- constellations, nebula's, dwarf planets, the space program, and Earth's atmosphere. 

I encourage you to pick up cards on a wide variety of subjects because you never know what your child will find interesting.  A couple days ago I picked up the animal and space cards.  I was certain that my daughter would love the animal ones and I figured that I could use the space ones to teach her the order of the planets.  My daughter does like the animal cards but the space ones are her current favorite.  I caught her looking at them by herself today and heard her say Plubo.  I asked her what she was saying and she held up a card that looked like the moon to me and said "Plubo".  I find it amusing that my daughter knows what Pluto looks like but cannot pronounce it correctly yet.

Pattern and Spatial Awareness Play

I love this Pattern Activity Toy from Discovery Toys (I have seen a lot of similar items here on amazon.com).  My daughter enjoys using the design cards that come with it as well as using the shapes for other fun activities.   Here are some pictures of our fun learning adventures.

These are just some examples of the cards.  Some are fairly easy and have the shape outlines drawn for your child.  The more difficult ones are just open images that your child has to figure out how to fill.

To make the easier cards more difficult and to help her learn how shapes combine to make other shapes I do one half of the design with large shapes and then lay out smaller shapes for her to use to finish the other half of the design.  You can also talk about mirror images and symmetry while doing these type of designs.

Here is another example of how we make the cards more difficult.  We try and only use one color for the whole design (not possible with all cards but fun to try).  This really builds spatial awareness.

I used this card to teach her how two shapes together create a new one.  To make this harder do not use the card so your child can not see the outline of the shape they need (put out a number of shapes so that they have to pick out the correct one).  Another fun activity is to cover up one of the images in the row- for example cover up the semi-circle in the first row, one of the semi-circles in the second row, a square in the third row and the square in the last row.

We also use the shapes to practice completing patterns.  I create a simple pattern and then she has to figure out which shape/color comes next.  Right now I only use a couple shapes and colors in each pattern.  As she gets better I will start making the patterns more complex.

Projector Fun

This post can now be found here.

Story Board

One way that I try to encourage a love for writing, along with reading, is by creating story boards of my daughter's favorite books and movies. 

We read a book or watch a movie and then pull out our large dry erase board.  I ask her "What happened first?"  Most of the time she skips a lot of the beginning and tells me something about the middle of the story (usually where the conflict starts building).  I write down whatever she says word for word.  If her wording is really confusing I will try and help her clarify what she means.  After we have the starting sentence I just keep asking "What happened next?"  I give her some prompts if she needs them and I try and make sure that she is going in order- "Where were they?" and "Did they save her first or did she get in trouble first?"  When we finish the story I always let her illustrate her story in the open space.

This is a fun way to encourage writing and it really helps to teach kids that stories follow a certain order for a reason and that important facts need to be stated.  If the princess never got in trouble then the carebears never have to rescue her so it's important to write down she was in trouble.