Numbers Pizza Puzzle

Numbers and Value Pizza Puzzle 🔢🍕

I made a simple puzzle with craft paper, to help the little guy understand and correlate numbers with their values.

ABC Pizza Puzzle

Mini loved the Numbers Pizza Puzzle which I had made for him earlier (a few posts back) that he asked for a letters puzzle next... So here it is! 😀

Rummaged through my stickers collection and managed to put together a few letters.

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. 

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! :)

Letter Sounds (of colours) Car Park

After the success of our first letter sound activity, I set up this second one for my little boy a few days back. This one too revolved around letter sounds but with a little twist. I set this game up like a fun car parking activity since my son loves parking his little cars and in fact just like watching actual vehicles being parked!

I used a long sheet of paper on which I drew a little track or a ramp. At the far end I added a few parking slots. On each parking slot, I added a sticky note and wrote a letter written on each. I placed a few of his toy cars at the other end of the ramp. 

He was to identify the colour of each car and then figure out the starting letter of the colour of the car, 'drive' it down the ramp and finally park the car in the corresponding car park marked with that sticky note letter! That is, Green car - G, Orange car - O, Brown / Blue / Black car - B etc. 

And so, he had fun with his little cars while practicing some letter sounds! :)

Number Game: Count - Match - Stick

After our first counting activity, the Pompoms and Muffin Tray Counting activity, I figured the Mini loves counting! So, to keep up with his interest, I planned to do more of such easy to set up and fun activities that involved counting.

So before we go over to the activity, wanted to share an awesome hack I found out recently. I have had an eye on the easel paper roll that is most commonly used for toddler art and craft work. I love the long roll of paper that can be cut to any size and spread over on the floor or wall. But honestly I found the easel paper rolls that are available in India a bit too expensive for my kind of use! I was on the lookout for something more economical. On a recent visit to a packaging and paper cups/plates store, I found this long roll of paper that he was selling. It was meant to be used a dining table liner at functions and parties. It looked longer than a regular easel paper roll only slightly thinner. Also, it was more greyish than white, but who cared. It costed only Rs.70! Without a second thought, I bought it and there you see is our very own easel paper roll for our very many activities and fun times ahead ! :)

So, coming back to this activity, I used a strip of my version of the easel paper roll, a marker pen, sticky notes and our favorite white board. It took me all of 10 minutes to set it up and kept the little one entertained and occupied for about 30 minutes! :)

Number Hunt and Erase

This was an impromptu activity that I set up for the Mini one day when he had a holiday from school. Our favourite white board and wooden numbers come together in this one. And to add in some sensory fun, a tub of toor dal/lentil was included. I knew the little guy would love this one... and he sure did!

We had earlier done a Number Hunt and Match sensory bin activity similar to this. It was loved by the little fellow that I wanted to do it again, but gave it a little twist this time. This fun little activity mainly revolves around number recognition and number matching. The objective of the game was to hunt for the hidden wooden numbers from the tub of lentils, find the same number written on the white board and erase them with the white board eraser! The sensory tub and the white board eraser add on to the fun element in this activity, making it a learn while you play activity!

Maze Walk Animal and Animal Pattern Match

We love maze games, we have done a few in the past like this one and I have noticed mazes always delight my little boy. Simple maze games are a great way to encourage toddlers to follow instructions, a procedure, improve their body balance and most importantly... they are a lot of fun!!

So in this maze game, we used a few cards from our Animal and Animal Patterns matching card game. We used just the animal patterns cards from the game and instead of the corresponding cards with the animals, we used our little toy animals to make it more fun!

I just made a little maze using our foam ABC blocks, kept all the pattern cards at one end of the maze and the toy animals at the other end of the maze. I asked my little guy to pick one animal at a time from the start of the maze, walk on the foam block maze to reach the other end and place the animal on its corresponding animal pattern card. 

He had to then go back to the start, pick another animal and down the maze again to match it... he did this till he matched all the animals and animal patterns!