Disclosure: We received these spray bottles from Oriental Trading to facilitate this series on getting ready for kindergarten through play. All opinions and ideas are our own.
Welcome to the first post of our "Getting Ready for Kindergarten" series, with playful ideas that help build skills that are needed for school. First up, numbers!
Kay's new thing is playing spy. (I don't even know where she heard about being a spy, but that's a whole other story!) So I thought of a way to incorporate that pretend play into this scavenger hunt-type learning game.
You will need:
- spray bottles
- index cards
- 1 (or more!) preschoolers with an active imagination
How to play:
I wrote numbers on the index cards with a marker. She especially gets 6 and 9 confused, so I made sure to include those, as well as some I was sure she did know. I hung them up with tape around the yard. Then I put water in the spray bottles and added a few drops of food coloring to them, just for extra fun. (Color equals fun, it's true!)
When it was time, I introduced the activity with a story... "We have an infestation in our yard." (I could see she was a bit uneasy about that part, so I quickly explained.) "Our yard has been invaded...by numbers! They're everywhere! Can you find them and spray them with the colored water? That will scare them away."
She was immediately into it, but even more so after I showed her how to hide behind things and creep up on the numbers and then jump out and squirt them. She took it from there. When she found a number, I asked which one it was, she named it and sprayed it happily.
What we're working on here:
- Fine motor skills (important for writing)
- Number recognition
Variations:
This could be used for many things, including identifying letters, shapes and sight words.
