Charlotte Today: Indoor Activities

Our Director of Monkey Business April was featured on Charlotte Today this morning discussing some fun indoor activities when your monkeys need a break from the heat.

When it is too hot to even go to the pool or a summer storm ruins your outdoor fun, head inside and ignore the screen with these fun, educational and motor sensory developing ideas.

Children need plenty of short, fun activities that will allow them to use their hands and develop hand/eye coordination in a way that swiping a screen just cannot do! And it’s a bonus if these activities also develop and support letter and number recognition and formation, math skills, color identification and more.

{These ideas work with children ages 3-5.}

Letter Recognition and Practice:

Here are fun letter activities for children before even putting a pencil in their hand to write letters. And if your older child complains when it’s time to practice handwriting you can pull out these fun tools and they won’t realize they are “working!”

1. Use shaving cream on a cookie sheet  or in the bathroom to write letters, sight words and more.
2. Create sensory bags filled with gel or shaving cream and trace letters of name, names of people in house, vowels, constants, etc.
3. Hide and find letters with large letter magnets in sand for younger kids or smaller ones in play dough or molding dough for older kids. Turn it into a game to see who can find the most vowels or consonants, once you find them all see who can make the most words out of the found letters.
4. Use Fundanoodle Muscle Mover cards for engaging activities to get the wiggles out before using the back to build letters with play dough and pipe cleaners.
5. Use Fundanoodle I Can Build kits and I Can Pound kit to build hand strength and letter recognition.

Math, Shapes and Numbers Practice:

1. Use clothes pins for a homemade sorting game.  Roll a dice and use the clothes pin to pick up pom poms or other small items and sort into cups or containers for young children to work on counting and sorting, greater than and less than. With older children you can use cards with math signs (plus, minus, equal) and create simple math problems with the pins or other items. 
2. Use puppets for picking up items to work pincher grip and hand strength.  Use a timer to pick up items and move them into cups and then count the items and determine who has less and more. You can then sort colors and even make charts of the colors.
3. Have a race to fill cups by having children guess how many beads (or other materials such as beans) will fill the cup then count them to see how close you are. You can also use a dice to roll and fill cups based on numbers or time how long it takes.
4. Use Fundanoodle bead cards for shape and color recognition.
5. Have squirt bottle races  in big pot or the bath tub with floating bath toys. Move the toys with the squirt bottle to the other side (this is great hand strength!) as a race or guess how many squirts it will take or which things move faster or slower. This is also great outside in a baby pool!

What other fun indoor activities are you doing with your children this summer?

To watch the clip from the show click here: http://www.wcnc.com/charlotte-today/Pre-school-games-263497081.html

Therapist Thursday….Dollar Store Finds Part 2

By Amy Bumgarner

Fundanoodle’s I Can Build Letter kits are a great multi-sensory way to allow your child to practice using his or her body to construct or write a letter before writing with a pencil on paper.  Other multi-sensory approaches you can use in conjunction with the kits include: sidewalk chalk on concrete or carpet squares, writing secret messages or pictures, and building straight lined letters or objects with popsicle sticks.

Fundanoodle’s Max and Alphies Adventures”workbooks are great for working on visual motor skills necessary for handwriting.  Using hands-on  2D and 3D manipulatives, such as puzzles and magnetic shapes are also great ways to work on those skills too!  do this before or after practicing in the Max and Alphie Adventures worksbooks to maintain the multi-sensory approach that is the basis for Fundanoodle.

Max and Alphie Go to School!

What fun!  Today, my monkey friend, Max, and I got to learn about two letters – “Bb” and “Ll.”  Even better, we got to play and learn with some terrific four- and five-year-olds.  We were a little nervous, but the teacher was really nice.  She didn’t make us do anything at first.  She had a nice voice and asked us sit in a circle and watch her write the letters.  She showed us how important it is to start at the green line at the top, before zipping down to the red line at the bottom.  Then, she hopped back to the top where she buzzed around two times to make the capital B.

Then, she let us explore the room and all the different centers.  At the bead table, we made new friends, while stringing beads to match the card on the table.  Max really liked coming up with his own patterns for stringing beads!

At the art table, we got to trace Halloween shapes and decorate them with glue and sparkly paper.  I traced a scary bat, and then, copied the word “b-a-t” on the shape.  Lucky for me I had just learned how to write a “b”!  I knew exactly where to start, thanks to the green and red lines the teacher showed us.

All the kids thought it was lots of fun, and the teacher said that tomorrow, she’ll teach us how to write the next letter.

We like school!  Maybe we can visit your classroom next?

Max and Alphie

Hooray! We’ve won a Tillywig Brain Child Award!

 

Yep, the I Can Build Lower Case Letters Activity Kit received a 2012 Brain Child Award from Tillywig. That makes TWO (one, two) awards for this Fundanoodle item this year! We’re thrilled!