Introduction to Addition ➕ a DIY maths busy box.

A few months ago, something came up that made me show the Mini simple addition using my fingers. He was so mesmerized by 'plus' that he requested for a 'plus activity!'.

As much as I was delighted that he understood how I set up activities based on his interests 😀, I didn't want to, as he is yet to learn the concept of addition at school. I usually prefer going in pace with his teachers.

But next day, as soon as he came back from school, he asked if I had set up the 'plus activity'! 😁 Well then, follow the child they say! So, I set this maths busy box for him. I wanted to keep it as simple and straight forward as possible.

Playdough Imprints Match Puzzle

A few days ago, we tried a fun little game with playdough and a few small toys. This is almost a no prep activity as its just way too easy to put together. We always have a batch of homemade playdough lying around in the fridge. So that one evening, when we had nothing else planned, I just pulled them out and decided to set this game for the little guy.

If you haven't tried making your own batch of playdough yet, please please do give it a try! Here is how we make our Homemade Playdough.

Its absolutely simple, needs very basic ingredients, its taste safe, its super soft and lasts for months if stored well! Well, we love it and have never ever bought readymade playdough till date.

DIY Pushpin Board

Pushpins are great for little hands to work on and develop their pincer grip. A good amount of pressure is required to push a pin down onto a board and the more the little hands practice this, the better for them. Its a fun pre-writing activity to keep minis entertained.

I wanted to try a few activities that needed a pegboard and a geoboard. We don't have both, so I DIYed a Pushpin Board, that now serves as both! I mounted it on a little box for ease of use and am very pleased with the results! 

This is definitely going down as one of my favorite and most productive DIYs. So much learning is a single toy! This is a long post with tonnes of pictures, but definitely worth scrolling through if you are a DIY fan like me who has a little one at home, who you want to keep busy creatively :)

Here are a few activity sheets for our pushpin board. These are great for developing pincer grip and fine motor skills.

• Colour Match - poke the pins on the coloured dots based on colour.

Colour Match

• Number Sequencing - wrap rubber band around the pushpins (0-1,1-2,2-3...etc) in order of numbers.

Number Sequencing

• Letter, Shape and Pattern Tracing - poke pins along the outlines.

Pattern Tracing

Letter Tracing

• Sticker Match - wrap rubber band around the pushpins of similar stickers.

Sticker Match

• Count and Match - wrap rubber band around pushpins of pictures with their corresponding number. 

Count and Match

• The Mini came up with a new activity as well... Random pattern making the pushpin and rubber bands.

Spray the ABC!

Here is yet another fun little game related to letter sounds and this one involves a spray bottle! Need I say more!? :D 

The 3 activities we did on letter sound identification were much loved by the Mini. Listing them here, in case you have missed them. 

• Letter Sounds and Object Match
• Letter Sound (of colours) Car Park 
• Object Hunt and Letter Sound Match - Sensory Play

For this activity, I first secured our wall behind, by taping a water resistant sheet on the wall over which I taped a sheet of paper. On this I had randomly written letters. Along side was a basket filled with random objects and a little spray bottle. The Mini had to pick an item, find the first letter of that item on the paper and spray it! Then move on to the next item until all are done and all letters are sprayed on!

The glee on his face says it all! :D

He had a blast with this one. Along with learning his letter sounds, he was also working his finger muscles by using that spray bottle  - double whammy! :)  I love such fun filled learning activities.

This activity took me less than 15 minutes to set up and minimal effort to clean up. I left the sheet on after he had completed one round of the activity. In just a bit, the paper dried up and was all ready for another round! I was delighted that the paper held for 3-4 rounds of play until the mini decided to attack it all over and sprayed every inch of it with water when it finally gave up and tore! :D

Clips (Paper and Clothes Clips) Activity Ideas

Last couple of days we have been doing a few simple fun activities using chart paper, paper clips and clothes clip. Primarily for improving fine motor skills while also reinforcing numbers and letters recognition and colours matching. These tiny little clips or pegs as they are also called, are great for developing a good pincer grip in little fingers.

When I first introduced the wooden clips to my little boy, a few months ago, it was for a name recognition activity. He found it really hard to work them. He was unable to open the clips. His tiny fingers were not ready for them and so I kept them aside for a few months and we used plastic clips for the activity instead. 

More recently. we again tried our hands at the wooden clips and this time he was able to work them perfectly! This time around, I first let him work on an activity that used plastic clips, then paper clips and finally we moved on to wooden clips. The difficulty level increased step by step and I am guessing that helped him get the hang of it.

Sharing here, the simple games we played and enjoyed using paper clips and clothes clips. 

Pretend Haircut

When the little one was around 2, I had got him a little kid's scissors. These are great for little hands, as they are not sharp and dangerous while are good enough to snip paper. I was excited to introduce these to him, but apparently he was not yet ready for them back then. He would just hold them but was not able to snip papers. So I kept them away and planned to reintroduce them after a few months.

As part of my work, which I do at home, I have a lot of cutting of fabric that I need to do (I make Memory Quilts!). Mini sees me at work and lately showed a lot of interest in wanting to sit with me and cut too! I was delighted and brought out his little scissors and handed him a sheet of paper. And voila! It was a hit this time and he took to it immediately!

It gave him great joy to see himself work his way around snipping paper and this kept him busy for a good time, while got to get some work done in parallel. Once he got a little fluent in basic cutting, I decided to make this craft for him - a pretend play hair cutting salon with wild haired little tissue paper roll men! 

Being a DIY enthusiast I have a whole lot of tissue paper rolls, cardboard boxes, craft paper and the like lying around to help me make up a DIY, as and when an idea strikes! So for this one, I used up a few tissue paper rolls and some basic stationery supply. It took me just all of 30 minutes or so to get these done. 

And the joy it brought to the little one was absolutely priceless! Worth every bit of the effort put in.

I introduced a few different textures for him to play around and work his cutting skills on. I used straws, crepe paper and craft paper for the hair of the tissue paper men. We have since then bought another kid's scissors which are slightly more sharper than the absolutely safe one which we used earlier. Since he is a little better with his cutting now, and since we have more textures here than only plain paper, I gave him a choice of both scissors to use as needed.

He needed a little reminder every now and then to open the scissors wide before attempting to cut and each time he did that, his little mouth too opened wide! :D Oh, it was the cutest sight!

This Mini Salon is going to remain one of my favourite DIYs to date. I loved every aspect from planning, making to presenting it to him to play and also watching him in delight and enjoying the set up! :) If you have a toddler who loves to cut, this one is for you! Do try it :)

Egg Carton Colour Match Game | Toddler Games

I love it when I get to re-purpose Mini's old toys and find newer ways to use them. That way, an old ignored toy gets a new life and garners new interest to be played with. 

In this DIY game, I recycled one of his early toddler toys. I had got him a set of lacing discs which he showed absolutely no interest in back then. Lacing never interested him and I have since then just kept away the entire set not knowing what else I could do with it.

A few months ago, I took the set out and used it for a super fun Shape Sorting Fishing Game which the Mini really took to and enjoyed. I was glad I was finally able to use the lacing discs in some way. We have since used them for simple sorting activity based on shape and colour. 

He loves colours in general and anything to do with colours! So, when I found a fine motor skills activity idea on Pinterest using egg cartons, I just knew I had to base it around colours for my little fellow. Using inputs from the post to prep up the egg carton with skewers, I added in a colour dimension and made it a colour sorting activity for him.

It took me all of 20-25 minutes to make this and kept the little fellow busy for a good amount of time. Along with the straight forward colours, I also coloured one slot in multi-colours just to get him thinking! He worked his way around sorting the coloured discs based on the colours around the skewers and took a while to figure out what went onto the multi-coloured slot :) Soon he decided random discs go onto that slot began stacking discs of different colours onto it.

Dump the ABC!

If you know my Mini a little, you will definitely know about his obsession for ABCs! He is truly madly deeply in love with the letters of the Alphabet that anything to do with letters, he is happy! Reading the wordings on our Tees, subtitles on TV, pages of books... well anything at all! :)

To encourage this interest of his, I set up lots of activities around letters for him. We have done letter recognition activities, letter cases matching activities and more recently have begun doing letter sound activities as well. 

This post is about a super fun little game that I made up for him, of course to do with letter and his favourite vehicle - the dump truck! The idea just popped up in my head and I couldn't wait to try it out. 

It is based around upper and lower case letters identification and matching. Mini knows his upper and lower case letters so this activity helped to reinforce that knowledge in a super fun way. 

He had to 'drive' his little dump truck, loaded with a capital letter at a time, through a maze that has lower case on either sides in random order. He had to find the matching lower case letter for the upper case letter that he is carrying in his dump truck and 'dump' the upper case letter at the correct dump spot! :D 

It was a super hit. Please go and try it if your tiny is a vehicle lover like mine! :)

Popsicle Sticks - Upper and Lower Case Letters Match

The first activity that we did around upper and lower case identification was the one with building blocks. It was a fun little DIY that the Mini loved and I give that activity credit for actually helping him identify most of the lower case letters. 

So, ever since then I wanted to do a few more activities around the different cases and finally got around setting this one up. It is a simple DIY and can be easily made with items available around the house. I love cardboard box DIYs and this is one of the easiest of them all!

You can use simple plain coloured popsicle sticks for this, but I had fancy coloured ones and I loved the pop of colour they brought in to the set up as a good contrast to the brown of the cardboard box. So, its not a must that you use coloured popsicle sticks here, but if you like pretty things like me... try to get them! :D They should be available in most stationery supply stores.

This activity not only helps in upper and lower case letter identification and association, it also helps work on the fine motor skills of those little hands pushing the popsicle sticks through the slots on the cardboard. Mini had a lot of fun doing this over and over and after almost 6 months, he still enjoys playing with this DIY :)

Name - Fill in the Blanks

Mini's obsession of spelling his name continues and after our first game around name recognition, we played this one recently.  This one combines all his favourites - sticky notes, white board and his name! So obviously, it was a hit! :D

It required minimal preparation and was all done in just 5 minutes. I used a long strip of paper sheet and stuck it on our balcony wall - Oh, our balcony is our favourite activity hangout zone! We both love spending time there. 

This can be done in a smaller scale on a sheet of paper spread on a table, or directly on the white board or any other way that you can think of. He just loves the balcony space and I wanted him to enjoy running up and down in the process of this game, hence set it up larger scale.

Along with helping in name recognition, this game also serves the purpose of some fine motor skills as it requires him to carefully remove the sticky note off the white board and paste it just right in the appropriate blank space and press it at the right spot, to ensure it sticks well.