Valentine's Day Math Games: Division and Subtraction Cards and other games

I made a Valentine's Day set of division cards to use with LD over the next week or so. We use these cards to play a game called Fast Track -- an idea we got from Peggy Kaye's Games for Math.
To make the board you need a large piece of butcher paper or poster board. There are three win spaces, three start spaces and various directions on the other spaces such as stay put, move ahead three, double move, triple move, go back 1 space, lose a turn and so forth. Each player takes a turn turning over a card and solving the problem. He/she moves ahead that many spaces and follows the directions on the space. For example, if he moves ahead 10 and lands on a double move space, then he gets to take another card and go again. The first player to land on a "win" space wins the game.
You can download a set of the Valentine's Day Division Cards here if you are interested.

Here's another glimpse at the game board I made over a year ago.

DD also loves playing this board came so I made a set of subtraction cards for her.  You can down load the
Valentine's Day Subtraction Cards here. We all played the game together with LD using his division cards and DD using her subtraction cards.

Since DD is still working on these subtraction problems and doesn't know them by heart, she uses her abacus (pictured below) to help her work through the problem. We still use many of the wonderful ideas and manipulatives from the Right Start Math curriculum, though we use it as an extra rather than our core math.

Last year when we played this game, DD was working on sums of 10 through 17.  I made a set of cards for her and you can download the Addition Cards here.

The other game we've been playing is just a simple eraser toss game.  ED has trouble remembering her numbers consistently by sight so she simply has to tell us the number she landed on.  DD has to double the number she lands on while LD has to square the number. It's a quick game that all three kids enjoyed.

In the photo below is a skip-counting maze I printed out for DD.  You can find it and other skip counting sheets (1s,2s,3s,4s,5s)  at Print Activities.

Finally, here are the Valentine's Day activities we did last year.

Our Move: On another note, next week, the week of Valentine's Day, our blog will be joining the Parent's team over at Parents.com/blog.  I'll have a link from this address to get you there.  I hope you'll check in on us there!  We've done some great experiments and will be sharing more about our geography, history and preschool activities in the next couple of weeks. 

Preschool: Free Valentine's Day Word Matching Game

ED has been working a lot on letter sounds and simple -at and -an words. I made this Valentine's themed word matching activity for her to work on over the next couple of weeks. She has to attach the clothes peg to the matching word on the wheel. It took some cutting pasting to put it together, but if you'd like to make your own you can download the pages I made here at our new location--Valentine's Day Word Match

On Tuesday, I'll be sharing another Valentine freebie (math) that I made for my 8 year old. Update: This post has links to many of our Valentine's Day Freebies including addition and subtraction pages, multiplication, skip counting and more!! You'll find that post over at our new location, homeschoolden.com

Other Valentine's Day themed activities:

Heart dot-to-dot (1 to 30 found here) (1 to 16 found here). There's also a Valentine candy counting maze at 2 Teaching Mommies.

Math Grid: We'll play lots of grid games where you roll the die and cover that many spaces until someone's board is completely filled. The one we're using is no longer available but you can find a cute Valentine bear grid game over at PreKinders. (Note: they don't have this exact printable available there anymore)

Counting Cards: I have some activities that are no longer available, but there's a similar count and clip activity at 2 Teaching Mommies called Cupid Clip Cards. Nicole at Tired Needs Sleep has very cute heart counting cards. You can find a Valentine's number match up at Confessions of a Homeschooler.

Jill over at Enchanted Homeschooling Mom has a very cute set of 1-12 number cards with Valentine owls.

Storage: Here's how I stored some of the loose bits in ED's workbox. I just stapled two heart together and glued another small heart to the front. Simple, but it helps contain the mess!

Other Letter V and Valentine Ideas: This letter hunt is by Erica over at Confessions of a Homeschooler. She has lots of other great ideas in this post. I really love the dry erase activity center that ED got for Christmas because you can slip other sheets (like Erica's printable) inside as well as the ones it came with. (I see it is currently $14.78 at Amazon.)

Valentine Crafts: There's lots of good craft ideas at Activity Village and at the Crafty Crow.   DD made the penguin and tissue paper heart card to the left for an elderly family friend who is quite ill.

Our Move: On another note, next week, the week of Valentine's Day, our blog will be joining the Parent's team over at Parents.com/blog. (NOTE: I worked under the Parents umbrella for 3 years. Now our blog is at homeschoolden.com) I'll have a link from this address to get you there.  I hope you'll check in on us there!  We've done some great science experiments and will be sharing more about our geography and history activities in the next couple of weeks.

We have lots of free Valentine's Day printables and resources at our new location here:

Check out our Valentine's Day posts (and free printables) by clicking on the button above!

Preschool Activities

While the other kids are working on their things, ED has lots of preschool activities in her workboxes. Here are a few things she's done this past week or so:

We played memory using -at words.

We are going through "My -at book." ED says the initial sound and then I help her smash the sounds together. This is definitely an activity we do together as she is not reading yet.  You can find the "-at book"  here.

ED did a sort with the living and non-living cards I download from Homemade Montessori.

Snowman Two Letter Sight Word Mat by Shelley at Childcare Land.

Cupcake Counting from File Folder Fun

Rainbow Activity: Mixing primary colors

ED and her big sister are always doing crafts of one sort or another. Today she wanted to make a spider's web while a few days ago she insisted we make a mouse!

 We've also been doing lots of geography and science activities for preschool, but I'll save those for another post.

Game: A to Z, Jr.

The girls got a new game for Christmas called A to Z, Jr by Discovery Toys.  What a great game!

The game itself is the perfect age for DD and LD (ages 6 and 8). It's similar to the game Scattergories. Each person rolls the die and picks up a card. Then he/she has to name as many objects as they can for the category they rolled. Categories might include:

• snack foods
• purple things
• stuff you see in a parade
• boring things
• stuff that fits in your pocket

The person covers the beginning sound of each object she/he listed.  To win the kids have to get five in a row while I have to cover my entire board.

We've been also using it for ED's preschool work.  One day we turned over some Memory cards that we have.  We took turns drawing a card and covering the first letter sound of the card we turned over.

Another day she went through some of the alphabet words we have (a cut and paste alphabet printout book I had on hand). I don't have the exact link, but here is something similar that you could print out on cardstock.

Preschool Math: numbers greater than 10

ED is ready to tackle the teen numbers. She often skips some of the numbers after 13. I am using a homemade version of the Montessori seguin board (download the packet I made here).  It's a board with lots of 10s in a row. The child then places a digit over the zero to make 11, 12, 13, etc.
1) First ED counted the number of animals.
2) Then she pulled out the same number of beads. I made a big deal about the group of 10 beads being called her special 'golden beads.' She promptly fell in love with them!
3) Next she chose the proper digit and placed it in the ones column to make it "one ten and one" (for 11), "one ten and two" (for 12) and so forth.

If you're interested in the printout packet I made of the seguin materials you can download them here. You can also buy a proper wooden seguin board (such as this or  this teens and tens board), but I never used them enough with my older two to warrant the price.

Snippets of our Week (for our 5-yr-old)

I've been meaning to put up a post about what we generally work on from day to day. But, with blogger not working for a while, I have a plethora of photos to share. So, here's a glimpse of what DD (just turned 5) has been working on these past couple of weeks.  Her "basics" include math, reading, handwriting, music/glockenspiel, arts&crafts and another unit-study (a lapbook in this case, but we usually have some sort of science/history/child-led unit occurring. Usually this is something we're working on together as a family.)

I called this pumkin bingo.  I made a die with 3-digit numbers on them.  Each pumpkin has one of those numbers.  We take turns rolling the die and covering our pumpkin if it has the corresponding number. To go along with that we've been building those 3 digit numbers using Montessori type number cards that we have from our Right Start Math curriculum (pictured below).

DD has been moving along quickly with her writing. I decided to purchase this writing, penmanship book from currclick called I Like Animals.  It is a bit pricey (I bought a bundle, which lowered the price a bit), but I have to say that DD LOVES this.  Yes, LOVES it!  She is zooming through it and works hard to get to the mazes.  So in that regard I can highly recommend it.  I printed it out on both sides of the paper and bound it together to look like a proper book.

DD practices the glockenspiel every day and now know about four pieces.  She won't allow Mom to help at all! In this photo she is playing Hot Cross Buns.

DD wanted to do a lapbook and chose to learn about butterflies and insects.  We took that opportunity to go through our classification cards.  We started with the living and non-living sort with free Montessori cards I downloaded from here.

Another day we used those same Montessori cards to sort the "living" cards into the five kingdoms. (http://homemademontessori.blogspot.com/search/label/5%20kingdom) Sorry about the blurry photo.

We still enjoy lots of time in the woods!

Anyway, continuing on with our animal classification review... a few days later we pulled out the vertebrate and invertebrate cards (which again were free.  Thank you homemade Montessori!)  This was really useful because DD's lapbook delved into the differences among the various invertebrate groups and had some good mini-books that complemented these sorting activities.  I'll put up a separate post about her butterfly/insect lapbook.

DD has been learning to recognize the written numbers, so this activity from filefolder fun has been just great!

This is an activity I got from Montessori Print Shop at some point.  I think it might have been one of their free downloads. It has a close up picture of certain items and then a view of the object from farther away.  It was just a quick 5 minute activity, but it intrigued ED who also gave it a go. (You can see her pink foot in the picture... she's often trying to interfere when she feels left out. My main recourse at the moment, is to have her workboxes filled with activities I can pull out for her at a moments' notice such as a puzzle, sorting, a new coloring sheet or things like that. Now that I write that, it occurs to me that I should pull out some activity bags for her once again.)

DD reads through two or three readers each day (for a total of about 15 minutes of reading or so).

DD has been very, very proud of her lapbook.  Here she's showing off her latest additions to Dad.  I'll write a separate post about her lapbook soon.

We continue to have music class with some friends each week.  DD's music class is focusing on world music.  This week we learned a bit about about the music of Bali in Indonesia. We watched a short video of a shadow puppet show on YouTube. Then each child used actual shadow puppets that Grams passed on to us to act out their own short skit.

We had the gamelan music from someone's trip to Bali on in the background as each person got a chance to put on a performance with the shadow puppets.

In the beginning of our music class, we always sing a few songs together. The kids have loved the crazy motion song "My Aunt Came Back" Each week we identify where Japan, Algeria, Mali (Timbuktu), Holland and Niagra Falls are located on the world map.  The kids always laugh as each verse adds a new motion (a hand fan, sheers, wooden shoe, chewing gum, a ping pong ball, rocking chair etc.)

Here we are all playing "Go to the Dump."  We take turns turning over two cards. The object is to find two cards that equal 10 (10 and 0, 9 and 1, 8 and 2 etc.)

This ladybird math activity goes along perfectly with Go To The Dump.  It's from Early Learning HQ.

So that's it for DD at the moment. I'm planning to do a similar post for LD (age 7) and ED (age 2 1/2) in the next day or so. Oh yes, and also will share DD's lapbook. She's very proud of it!

Bird Unit Activities

Last night I set up the table with a few more bird-related activities:

I made these cornstarch-clay eggs earlier this summer to prepare for our bird unit.  The bird's nests aren't very elaborate (I tore up grass late last night and put them in small bowls).  Miraculously the grass didn't wind up all over the room! ED needed a bit of help, but by the second and third time through she could put the egss in the correct nest.

I don't have access to a printer yet, so drew a few bird pictures free-hand.  DD chose a cardinal to color (she added tufts to the top of its head) while ED was a bit more free form!

Be sure to check out My Montessori Journey because she shared a lot of her wonderful ideas relating to a bird-unit they did in their classroom last April or May.