Woah, all I can say is that maths has changed since I was at school, with new ways of working things out and also new tools to help children. I had never heard of number bonds. So to make life easier I have gathered together some games, posts and aids that might help. I have discovered that often when children are playing they have no idea they are learning.

These are not online tools – when we have schools and teachers offering online learning I think our children need some physical games and toys to help! These are aimed at helping parents support our children and encourage them to play in the house when they are not receiving schooling via their teacher.

Maths Learning Games and Tools

Maths can take many forms and many of these games and tools will be family to your children from their classrooms. Often using a physical representation can really help a child visualise the problem.

Make your own Paper Plate Clock

Shape Rocket Free Printable

Measuring and estimating with ribbons

DIY maths game for kids – Out of this world maths 

Pirate booty maths game with gems

Maths and Art Collide = Parabolic curves

Shape Sticks

Literacy Tools and Games

I am not going to lie phonics were not something I learned at school, but were transformation for my children’s learning. Often just supplying children with simple letters and cards helps and reading with your child is the most important thing you can do. My boys used to love playing scrabble or eben using the tiles to spell out, it is a fab learning game.

Fun Phonics Game with small collectables

Shape Rocket – a fab preschool activity

I love how simple activities like this shape rocket can be adapted to the age and ability of children.  For younger children, you can precut all the shapes, but for older ones, you could make a stencil and get them to trace the shapes and cut them out.  You could also use craft foam or even felt to practice on scissor skills.

If you cut the shapes in felt then you can reuse them over and over again on a felt board without glue.

Materials:

This post contains affiliate links. If you make any purchases after clicking one of these links, I will make a small commission (hopefully enough to keep me in tea all year) – at no extra cost to you! This allows me to keep creating and sharing free tutorials and content for you. Thank you!

1. Coloured Craft Papers
2. Pencil
3. Scissors
4. Glue Stick

No products found.

Preparing the Shapes

If you are going this with younger children then prepare the shapes beforehand but it is great scissor practice for older children.

You can either do freehand drawing or use the template. Print and cut out the shapes from the template. Take a coloured craft paper and place a shape cut out on it; simply trace around the sides of the shape.

Use scissors to cut out the traced shapes from the coloured craft paper. Cut out the shapes in different sizes.

Shapes ready? Now it’s time for the little ones to get creative and learn!

Create a shape craft activity kit. The kit would include 3 supplies – shape cut outs of different colours and sizes, a glue stick and a few usual white papers (cut the papers into customized size if required).

Before they get started you may show them a real picture of a rocket and let them do the rest.

Meanwhile, teach them the names of the shapes and colours.

Make learning fun and crafty!

Measuring and Estimating with Ribbons – A Simple Activity

This is a fun activity that my boys love.  Ribbons and twines are great for kinaesthetic learners and keep smaller children engaged whilst older children are challenged by the use of measuring equipment.  You can use non-standard measurements if you don’t have a ruler or tape measure – straws, lollipop sticks, anything straight – and then when your little ones are ready to start reading measurements, you can graduate to using rulers.

In our house, we start this activity without the ruler or tape and estimate or guess which little bundles are going to be the longest and why – and then we start measuring.

Using a Ruler/Tape Measure

Reading a ruler can be tricky. The little notches and striations seem meaningless – and explaining centimetres and millimetres before we even consider inches can be difficult at best for little brains.  We start with whole centimetres as we use the decimal system in schools and society and go from there.  Whole and half centimetres come next, and then millimetres and decimal points follow after that. There’s scope for talking about rounding up and down, and estimating.

Tricky Issues

Estimating is difficult for children to revert to after learning to measure as they have a natural tendency to want to be “right” and feel that estimates are wrong – and need to be correct.  Reassure your little one that estimates are just guesses and are fun to make.  It’s fun to be surprised sometimes, and there’s no need to be right all of the time.

Equipment

For our activity, all you need is varying lengths of ribbon, string or twine, and a ruler or tape measure.

How To Use The Baskets

Wind the ribbons up into little spools and place them into a container – we had these little picnic baskets at home that made for fun little holders.

Each child has a container or ribbon and then the activity is open ended.

Empty out the spools and estimate which will be the longest ribbon or twine. Why do they think that?  Place them in order of which they think is longest to shortest.

Using the ruler or tape measure, take their estimate of the longest and show how to start at the 0 and stretch the ribbon out until the end.  Think about what they should do if the ribbon is longer than the ruler (if you are using one).

Children who are comfortable writing numerals can record their findings in any way they like. My boys enjoy drawing the ribbons [make sure you use ribbons of different colours in this event] and writing their numbers by them.

There are so many ways to explore measuring, estimating and rounding with rulers and tape measures – take the lead from your little one and support them in their exploration.

See our other learning with manipulatives posts here:

• Maths Game with candy
• Fun phonics game with collectables 
• Maths game using stickers
• Sensory Tic Tac Toe or Noughts and Crosses

 Other great measuring activities

W is for Whale {Measuring Activities} from Preschool Powol Packets
Watermelon Seed Spitting Measurement from Schooling a Monkey
Measuring Distance with Water Guns from Teach me Mommy
Measuring and Estimating with Ribbons from Mum in the Madhouse
Just How Big Were the Dinosaurs? from Bambini Travel
Measuring Toys from Play & Learn Every Day
Grow a Duck Weighing Activity from Something 2 Offer

Today’s game is a maths one, that we play quite often as children without realising that we’re learning. As it’s after Easter we’ve got quite a few jelly beans in the house but you can use any snack you’d like.

Maths Jelly Bean Game

To play our Jellybean Jumble Maths Game, you will need:

Little Sweet Bags (UK Link) or Cups (UK Link)
Jellybeans
A Price List
Customers

It takes minutes to set up. Simply draw and price your snacks as a little menu and distribute a mixture of the snacks in each bag. You can do this randomly or strategically – for example, if you’re trying to teach number bonds.

So, the menu sets out the cost of each item and then in each little bag or cup is a combination of the menu items. There are a few ways to play this and differentiate depending on the age and ability of your little ones. Mine are 4 and 6, and as I want them to play together, we’ve taken a very simple approach and are adding the jellybeans up.

The boys take it in turns to bring a customer to the shop. We’ve used our Yoshi today. They select a little bag of beans and take them to the checkout person. Upon emptying the bag, the beans are placed against the menu and then the totals are added.

If the total is correct, the player wins the bag of beans!

Extensions to the game are easy – if you have coins around the house, you can play with these to reinforce the real-world connection, but the maths alone can be fun.

Once the bags are all sold, your little shopkeeper can restock their shelves by creating a bag worth a specific price – and see if they can assemble more than one possible jellybean combination for a particular price.

There are so many ways to play – and they can be as challenging as necessary, whilst still having fun. How cool is it to have a jelly bean game.

• How Many Cows on the Farm Counting Game from Life Over C’s
• Gold Fish Measurement Math Game from Learning 2 Walk
• Teach Preschoolers Fractions from Preschool Powol Packets
• Feed The Penguin from Adventures of Adam
• Jelly Bean Maths Game from Mum in the Madhouse
• How Many Goldfish in the Bowl Game from Play & Learn Everyday
• Cheerios Number Tracing from Schooling a Monkey
• Fish Cracker Color Patterns from The Kindergarten Connection

Today we’re working with my boys’ favourite type of manipulatives – small toys. Our house is practically taken over by tiny little monsters, zombies, pets, glittery creatures – and now these little people, the Disney Tsum Tsums. I’ve no idea how my now four year old found out about them but suddenly they became the must-have toy of his little life and he drew little pictures of them on his wishlist for Christmas AND his birthday. They’re tactile, rubbery little creatures which thankfully have no horrible smell to them – and as they’re Disney I’m generally happy enough to indulge him with them as rewards for jobs well done.

This game can be differentiated for all ages and across quite a few curriculum subjects. Today we’re looking at using our little Tsum Tsums for literacy, and we’re playing a phonics-type game.  This game can be adapted to suit all abilities, and the little Tsum Tsums can be substituted for any little toys that you have around the house.

Fun Phonics Game with Tsum Tsums

You will need:

A container for each player to collect their Tsums into
Letter tiles in a bag
Disney Tsum Tsum toys

We used little white picketed fence containers that we use for growing magic beans [jellybeans] in, because they were like little corrals for the Tsums and my boys enjoyed welcoming new members that they had won into their ‘fold’. They also looked quite sweet, peeping through the little fence posts.

Ways to play this phonics game

• Player one takes a letter tile from the bag and sounds it out.
• They then look at the little toys and select one that they want in their fold.
• If the player can describe the toy with a word beginning with the phonic tile’s sound, they put them in their fold.
  Encourage your little ones to be more adventurous with their vocabulary! Not just “red” but “ruby red”
• Think about the behaviour, expression and characteristics of the little toy [if known] instead of focusing solely on the appearance.
• This continues until all of the toys have found a home in a player’s container.

The Final Round

If your children are competitive like mine, or you’re playing too and you want to offer them the chance to win your Tsum Tsums, then a final, timed round can be played – and a sand timer will be needed. This is best suited to children who are over the age of 6, who aren’t emotionally attached to the little toys and who understand that this is just a game and that no toys are being stolen from each other.

Each player has one minute to try and poach the other player’s Tsums by extracting tiles from the bag and describing one of their opponent’s characters. A new tile can only be taken from the bag after the toy before it has been placed in their fold. After one minute, the next player takes their turn and after all players have completed their minute, the Tsums are counted to determine who was the winner.

Alternative ways of winning for older children can be determined by listing the words they use and awarding points for length of word and complexity.

Have fun with your Tsum Tsums – and in case you’re wondering, they are pronounced Tsu-mmm Tsu-mmm, kind of like zoom zoom, but with the initial sound as it is in tsunami!

Other fab ideas for using small toys in learning:

Car Parking Lot Preschool Math Grid Game from Life Over C’s

Alphabet Car Wash from Learning 2 Walk

Sorting and Counting with Die-Cast Trains from Crafty Mama in ME

Directionality Activity with Small Cars from Teach Me Mommy

Forest Animals Letter Sounds Activity from Stir the Wonder

Learning Shapes with Toy Cars from Adventures of Adam

What Makes Ice Melt Fastest from Raising Little Superheroes

Fun DIY Phonics Game from Mum in the Madhouse

What Do Animals Eat? Classification Activity from Schooling a Monkey

Color Mixing with Toy Cars from The Kindergarten Connection

AM and PM Time Telling with Shopkins from Sugar Aunts

Sorting Animals Venn Diagram Activity from Mom Inspired Life

Hands-on Way to Learn Letter Sounds from School Time Snippets

Fairies & STEM Activities: Gardening with Kids from Edventures with Kids

Name & Letter Practice: A Painting With Toy Car Activity from Play Dough & Popsicles

Learning Letters & Reading With Cars! from Preschool Powol Packets

Shopkins Sorting from Still Playing School

This maths craft and activity is brilliant at engaging children of all differing abilities.  I’ve used it in my classroom and the children love it.

DIY maths game for kids – Out of this world maths

How To Play Out of this world maths, a DIY maths game for kids:

•  Sort the stickers into jars 1-6 [to correspond with the dice].
• The first player rolls a dice and takes a sticker from the appropriate jar.
• The player adheres the sticker to their paper and begins to create their scene.

 

• Transportation Theme Preschool Activities from Life Over C’s
• Foam Stickers Process Art from Still Playing School
• Fill in the Bugs from Learning 2 Walk
• Valentine’s Day Hearts Decorated with Foam Stickers from Crafty Mama in ME
• Shape Puzzle with Foam Stickers from Mom Inspired Life
• DIY I Spy Foam Book by Best Toys 4 Toddlers
• Foam Sticker & Rolling Pin Painting Project for Kids from Play Dough & Popsicles
• Letter Sticker Matching Activity from Books and Giggles
• Foam Sticker  Writing Activity from The Kindergarten Connection
• Foam Stickers Name Puzzles from Teach Me Mommy
• Broken Hearts Puzzle from Adventures of Adam
• Seasons Weather Sorting Activity with Foam Stickers from In The Playroom
•  DIY Gameboard Kids Can Make from School Time Snippets
• Fun Foam Sticker Letter Match Activity from Artsy Momma
• Sticker Shape Matching from Play & Learn Everyday
• DIY Maths Game for Kids from Mum in the Mad House

Sensory Heart Tic Tac Toe

This is a really sweet and simple activity which has kept my boys occupied for quite a while!  Adding a sensory element to the standard tic tac toe game really seemed to engage them – especially as there was the chance that they might have to miss a turn.

Instructions for Sensory Heart Tic Tac Toe:

How to Play Sensory Heart Tic Tac Toe:

 

By using small erasers, you are encouraging your kids to use their pincer grip

• Fill the Jar Addition Game with Mini Erasers from Life Over C’s
• Sticky Ten Frames from Still Playing School
• Construction Site Preschool Letter Sensory Bin from Learning 2 Walk
• Mini Eraser Counting Game: Race to Fill the Cup from Mom Inspired Life
• Kindergarten Patterns from Sugar Aunts
• Valentine’s Day Grid Math Game with Mini Erasers from Stir the Wonder
• Emotions I Spy Bag from Adventures of Adam
• Valentine’s Puppies Roll and Cover Game from Simple Fun For Kids
• Lots-of-Love Heart Sight Word Game from Raising Little Superheroes
• Stack the Erasers Fine Motor Math Game from School Time Snippets
• Sensory Heart Tic Tac Toe from Mum in the Madhouse
• Adding up to Five Activity from Play & Learn Everyday
• Number Bonds Activity Using Mini Erasers from Lalymom
• Mini Erasers Busy Box from Teach me Mommy