We are back with another Invitation to Play from our home. I’m amazed at the amount of skills you can work on with one Invitation to Play tray. And these are skills that I did not plan ahead of time. I simply looked at things that I thought would be fun to set out for my little guy to play with. And he sure did have fun this time. Here’s the tray…

This whole tray was inspired by a bag of decorative marbles that I found at Walmart. I think they were around $6.

Back to our play/school/exploration time…

I need to be real honest with you here. I didn’t put the buttons in the picture on the tray because they didn’t color coordinate with everything else. I know, right? Moving on!

This was just so much fun to be a part of. He started asking, “What’s 3 + 8?” You see where this is going, right? “Well, buddy, let’s grab 3 marbles of one color and 8 marbles of another color, then we’ll see what we come up with.” And it went this way for a while. In the previous picture he had pulled out 4 different colors of 4s which actually led us to…

Am I going to start teaching him his multiplication facts? No. But it was fun to introduce it to him in a way that made sense. And since I was writing on the board, guess what he wanted to do.

So let’s recap all that happened in this simple Invitation to Play. There was sensory play with the rice & marbles, fine motor skills with the tongs and picking out marbles, he sorted the marbles into different piles for addition, and the there was the actual addition, an introduction to multiplication, and writing. That’s a lot of stuff!

Now I have to top that for next week. I better get cracking. Maybe I should do something to incorporate those poor desert animals & seashells that hardly got touched. 😉

What about you? What have you been doing in school? Do tell. 🙂

Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful week!
Antoinette

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