| Guest post by Education.com

Sometimes it can be difficult to find educational activities for children that are both fun and engaging. Sometimes your child will just want to play, not learn and play at the same time.

However an online website called Education.com offers a wide range of learning resources for children from preschool to primary school age. They offer fun and educational games, worksheets, stories, songs and activities like the one they’ve given me below.

I am more than happy to present to you “Clothespin Drop” – an educational game that will help preschool-aged children to learn about colours, sorting, pattern matching and counting. I have also added a couple of alternative suggestions, just look for the pink text below to see what they are. I haven’t changed much because it’s pretty good the way it is; a why-fix-it-if-it’s-not-broken kind of thing.

I’ve been wanting to give this game a try as it looks so cool but I haven’t gotten round to doing so with LO as work’s been busy (will be more so in the lead-up to summer!). I hope you like the activity below – if you decide to give it a try, let me know! Education.com may be providing me with more games and activities to offer you guys so keep an eye out for them as they’ll be exclusive to this blog.

If you fancy checking out there other games, visit their site:
www.education.com/resources/geometry/

Activity: Clothespin Drop!

Age: Preschool children

Encourage your preschooler to practice color recognition, counting and pattern matching with this fun and colorful clothespin drop game. This is a great way to get your child excited about learning the basics of math.

What You Need:

• 5 Coffee cans (or Bisto gravy cans or anything else similar)
• 5 Sheets of construction paper (red, orange, yellow, green and blue)
• Clear tape
• Scissors
• 25 Wooden clothespins
• Tempera paint* (red, orange, yellow, green, blue)
  *you can also DIY with some egg yolk and food colouring – cheap & cheerful
• Markers
• Paintbrushes
• Stopwatch, or digital clock

What You Do:

1. Help your child cut down each piece of construction paper to the size.
2. Roll one color of paper around each can and tape it in place.
3. Have your child tell you which color is on each can, while you write the name of the corresponding color onto the paper.
4. Ask her to separate the clothespins into groups of 5.
5. Have her paint each group of clothespins a different color. Let dry.
6. Line up the cans on the floor in a row, in the center of a room.
7. Scatter the clothespins, mixing the colors around in the cans.
8. Encourage her to see how quickly she can separate the colors and put them in the corresponding can. Time her to see how quick she is!
9. Dump them out again and mix them up. Tell her what her last time was and shave off a few seconds. Yell, “Go!” and have her re-sort them. Yell, “Stop!” at the end of the time allotted. Did her speed increase? The more she practices, the faster she’ll get!
10. Practice creating patterns by timing her as she places clothespins in the colored tins in a specific order. As she continues, try to introduce more complex patterns.

Enjoy!