This post may contain affiliate links.
One thing that I have found to be so important in our learning environment is to fill our house with learning games and manipulatives that the kids enjoy working with. It has been a huge help to make our learning more hands-on and interactive. I truly believe that is the way learning should happen- especially with young children. As soon as I started teaching my children at home, I changed the focus of the toys and games that I buy. I like to buy things that have a purpose- that teach something. It’s been really great because we play & learn at the same time. My kids love this so much and so do I! Today I am going to share some games & toys with you that we love and use regularly.
- Letter Tiles
-Great for teaching the alphabet, spelling
- Dominoes
-You can play lots of math games with these
- Playing Cards-play Math War & other math games
- Bean Bags
- Pattern Blocks
-There are tons of free printable pattern pages you can find online
- Animal Counters
-great for patterns, counting, weaighing, measuring…
- Maps and map Puzzles-geography, obviously!
- Puzzles- there are so many kinds
- Dice- number & letter ones—games!!
- Boggle-Great for beginning spellers!
- What’s Gnu-Great for teaching & practicing spelling!
- Magic Math Machines- They have them for addition, subtraction, Multiplication & Division. I was lucky to find them at a thrift store.
- Flash Cards-We have tons of flash card sets. At Target and the dollar store they always have a bunch of different kinds of these in the fall that we like to pick up & use for all kinds of purposes. I usually hole punch them & put them on rings to keep in order.
- The Learning Journey has some great games & puzzles that you can find at lots of stores (Our Ross & T.J. Maxx stores carry them often) We have a few & my kids really like them.
- Leap Frog has some amazing educational toys and games. We have a few: The fridge Magnetic word builder is fun to practice 3 letter words.
What toys and games do you have that you and your family love to use in your school?
Need creative teaching ideas?
Subscribe to my weekly email updates and get access to my FREE printables library.
See my privacy policy.
Enchanted Homeschooling Mom says
May 25, 2012 at 9:13 pmPuzzles, puzzles and more puzzles, LOL! We also use most of the same items that you listed above. When our math animal counters temporarily relocate I tend to use our daughter’s colored hair bands as counters. Both of the kids have also recently taken to our abacus.
Kat says
May 30, 2012 at 1:26 pmGreat post! 🙂 Learning games are a big part of our homeschool. We like board-type games like Boggle, Scrabble, Bananagrams, Monopoly, Yahtzee, puzzles, etc. Since we are all computer junkies, lol, we also like online learning games. We have a few sites that we like. SpellingCity and LearningGamesforKids (LGfK is totally FREE!) are at the top of our favorites list! 😀
Again, great post. Thanks so much for sharing!
Katie
Deb Chitwood says
June 2, 2012 at 2:31 amGreat ideas, Karyn! My kids always loved to use learning games when we homeschooled. I featured your post at the Living Montessori Now Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/LivingMontessoriNow