Treasure Hunts & Maps

Treasure Maps with Mother Goose Time

Treasure maps are always cool around here and the excitement from Mr Z when he found out they were focus for the day, was pretty awesome.
Mother Goose Time provided some brown paper for the Make & Play craft: a treasure map. Some small jewels were also included. Mr Z went to work and made a simple map before we got started on a few other activities.
After making a map in 2 minutes, we played one of the suggested games in the MGT guidebook. There were jewel shape cards to put into the pocket cube and matching shapes to cut out along with a treasure box. I hid the shapes under plates and we took turns rolling the cube. We had one chance to find the matching jewel. If we guessed correctly, the jewel was collected in the treasure box. It was a different way to play the Memory game.

Mr Z had a bit of trouble following directions. He would roll the cube and then look under every plate until he found the matching jewel. Mr Z did not want to only flip one plate for each turn.

For a long time, we played Treasure Hunt... a game we made up. I hid the treasure box in a room and taped the jewels to the walls as a trail leading to the treasure box. We roll-played for a while. Open doors were entry ways to caves. Big talking crabs guarded the path and would not let us by unless we told him the password. Pirates chased us while trying to steal our map. It was a good time.
Then, Mr Z wanted to look at the tiny jewels that came in the daily bag. We sorted them by color onto the jewel shapes and even counted them. Of course Mr Z had to glue them on too. Sometimes spontaneous activities end up a lesson in disguise... Math; sorting, counting, most/least.

After that we continued our treasure hunt with the even more precious jewels because now they were sparkly.

Sunny Tokens Make Everything Better

Alphabet Island with MGT

Like I said before, I am completely behind with all sorts of things. Summer has gotten everything all mixed up so far. We were having a grumpy day... from everyone. But, when I figured I'd better pull out a MGT activity, we found a huge shiny gold token in one of the daily bags.

The boys agreed that would be a fun thing to do... play with a gold token.

This little game cheered us right up... though we had to make a few accommodations.

The cards were pictures of crabs, suns, and fish.  Each category had a few differences like wearing sunglasses or a bow or just regular.

This game was supposed to a guessing game and a sort of process of elimination. The instructions suggested to play on the floor, but we had to use the table since Litttle Miss would have attacked and ruined everything.

The gold coin was supposed to hidden under a card and you guess to find where it is. But we soon noticed that the card with the coin under it was much higher than those without. The boys could spot it right away. So we had to come up with a way to make it a little more difficult.

I found tokens and play coins that were laying around and placed them under each card. This way all of the cards were raised up and the boys couldn't find the big gold token the instant they looked at the cards.

By asking questions like, Is the coin under a red crab? Is the coin under a card with glasses? the boys were able to eliminate the categories of cards that it shouldn't have been under. They were pretty quick at the game. But, they had fun trying to stump me when it was my turn to guess.

After the game we also played another game of Hide n Seek with the gold sun token. We took turns hiding it in the living room and then playing Hot & Cold to search for it. Mr Z always gets too impatient when trying to find something with these games and asks for additional clues.

But, we had a good time with the big gold sun token. It helped brighten our day. (pun intended.)

Board Games with MGT

Alphabet Island

One of the many things we like about Mother Goose Time are the games that come with the unit. On the day of Sandcastles, one was included that used several components from the curriculum.

This game was called Build a Castle. It came with a board and different colored crabs as the pieces, or markers. The game used the foam pocket cube as a giant die and the building block manipulatives that came with the curriculum.

As you roll the cube you move your crab around the board. Which ever color/number you land on, that's what you add to your "castle". (Land on a red 1 and you add 1 red building block to your castle.)

This was a great little game to learn or reinforce numbers and colors while also accommodating creative/imaginative play. 

As Mr A build his castle throughout the game, he designed his to look like the castle on the gameboard.

Mr Z made his like a sword.

We had a great time with this little game and I appreciated that it incorporated the manipulatives in a fun way. Both boys had fun with this one and it helped Mr Z with his numbers a bit more.

Math with Sea Shells

Alphabet Island with Mother Goose Time

"She sells seashells by the seashore, and the shells she sells are surely seashells."

A tongue twister to start the lesson always get the sillies out.

I have been behind in life lately. What does that mean... the oldest was just out of school for the summer. He finished Kindergarten! Family was in town for over a week so the kids got lots of cousin time. I haven't been blogging our activities when we have squeezed them in. The Little Miss is now sick. We've been adjusting to a non-existent summer schedule.

Anyway...

This month the theme is Alphabet Island. It's reinforcing all the letters of the alphabet in a fun Island/luau kind of way. Its about everything beach related. Lucky for us, we've been to the beach a few times recently too as "field trips" of course. 

We've always liked seashells, so when we found real ones in the daily packet for Seashell day, we were excited. These number cards below were also included. So, I pulled out the kinetic sand, dumped in the shells and the boys picked a number and went digging for that many.

Mr A and Mr Z took turns pulling cards and finding shells. This was great for Mr Z. He was able to practice some one-to-one correspondence with pointing to the shells while counting aloud.

When MrA had a few cards full of shells, I asked him how many he had altogether. He began counting by 2's. (I'm pretty sure I've never taught him that.) But, he figured it out rather quick and was proud to have found the answer without any help.

Mr Z was matching the shells to the Invitation to Create inspiration photo. I always forget that matching is an early form or introduction to math. But, its something the boys tend to do automatically.

They even pressed the different shells into the sand to see what kinds of imprints they made.

Sand, shells and doing math without even realizing it. That equals success in my book.