Green Olives & Ham

Shape Bingo

Here is an activity that would go right along with your "B" Letter of the Week.  Oh, are we still doing the Letter B?  It seems like we've been on "B" for about 3 weeks, but the letter "B" is pretty exciting, especially the Banana Blueberry Bread that we made.

Anyway, this is Shape Bingo.  And we don't play this like your typical Bingo game.  I made our Bingo "Card" using this cool Melissa & Doug Shape Sorter.  I cut duplicate shapes out of construction paper, but you could also do only one construction paper shape, make them the same color as the wooden shapes, and match the wooden shapes to the Bingo card.

 But having the duplicate shapes also work because I decided that the best way for us to play this game was to toss all the shapes up in the air and have them fall on us like raindrops.  Then my daughter could gather the shapes and match them to the Bingo Card.

You could also do it as a scavenger hunt.  I'm not really into competition between children of this age, so I would only have one Bingo card so the children could work together to find all the shapes on the Bingo card.

I never have much luck with scavenger hunts.  So if my daughter doesn't want to do it, I'll simply put the shapes around the room, and she finds them as she's playing with other stuff.  And it's still as exciting as a scavenger hunt.

- Michelle

The color scavenger "no prep" hunt

My favorite part of the above title is "no prep".  Although I love creating activities with construction paper and glue, sometimes there just isn't time for that.  So here's a new segment that I like to call "No Prep Activities". 

The first one is a color scavenger hunt.  Here's what you need to do:

- Place different colored construction paper around the room.
- Ask the children to find different items that are a certain color.  For example "I see something that is orange and is used by "Go Diego Go".  You could also let the children run the whole game.  Sometimes my daughter will take the lead and say "I see something red".
- Once the children find an item that is a certain color, they are asked to place the item on the correct colored construction paper.
- At the end of the game, count how many items are on each colored construction paper.  You can then start a list using your dry erase board to see how many items are on each color.

For some variations, you could ask the children to stand on their favorite color.  My daughter has a collection of beanie babies.  We sometimes use the beanie babies, and I'll say "What is Tyrone's favorite color"?  It could just be based on something they are wearing, or Tyrone's favorite color is red today, just because.

The picture below shows you the beginning of this game. 

Towards the end of it, we had so much stuff all over the place.  It was such a tripping hazard.  You know what that means. 

Clean up, clean up, everybody everywhere. 
Clean up, clean up, everybody do your share!

My favorite color today is ...... green.  Just because!

- Michelle