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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.
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Letter Tiles
-Great for teaching the alphabet, spelling
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Dominoes
-You can play lots of math games with these
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Playing Cards-play Math War & other math games
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Bean Bags
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Pattern Blocks
-There are tons of free printable pattern pages you can find online
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Animal Counters
-great for patterns, counting, weaighing, measuring…
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Maps and map Puzzles-geography, obviously!
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Puzzles- there are so many kinds
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Dice- number & letter ones—games!!
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Boggle-Great for beginning spellers!
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What’s Gnu-Great for teaching & practicing spelling!
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Magic Math Machines- They have them for addition, subtraction, Multiplication & Division. I was lucky to find them at a thrift store.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Enchanted Homeschooling Mom says
Puzzles, 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
Great 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
Great 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