Olympic rings, medals and colouring pages

The Olympic games has just started and Hungary has already won 2 gold medals (swimming and fencing). E. is dying to do Olympic activities all day.

I printed her some colouring pages:

• Rio 2016
• Olympic rings
• Medals

She coloured and coloured and coloured. She used her new colour pencils we've just got her: Maped Duo colours

She loved this set of pencils as gold and silver colours are included too.

We talked about the Rio symbol of three people holding hands and dancing, the meaning of the Olympic rings (they represent the five continents where the sportsmen and sportswomen come from) and also mentioned they receive medals if they come first, second or third place. She was fascinated by the medals.

So on the spot I decided to make medals for her. I cut 3 circles out of cardboard. We painted one gold, we covered the other with kitchen foil (i.e. silver medal) and the last one E. coloured brown to reach a bronze-like colour.

E. took this photo of the medals

We pulled out an orange ribbon from Mommy's leftover ribbon box and we fixed  it cut in three pieces on the back of the medals with double-sided sticky tape.

The proud gold medallist 

As for the Olympic rings we used paper plates. I cut out the middle and we painted them 5 different colours: blue, black, red, yellow and green.

 We let them dry and then E. cut the yellow and the green so we can weave them into each other.

Tangled rings

Some Cello tape and it was on display.

Little preparation and a great outcome.

Pin the heart

E. found a small box of thumb pins before Valentine's Day and went back to it time and time again. She was asking how we use them and what they are for. So I decided to put together an activity in which she can use thumb pins and also connected to the upcoming Valentine's Day.

I printed a do-a dot heart from the net and picked one our IKEA cork trivet. I coloured the dots so it would be more fun to use the right colour thumb pins.

While doing the pinning you can revise the colours and learn the word "cork" itself.

When finished she put more pins in the middle. The next day she pulled them all out and packed them away.

This activity helped her muscles strengthen in her hands as well. We'll do more of this kind of activity as E. loved it and it's a great pre-writing task. (We can revise shapes or have a shamrock to pin for St. Patrick's Day etc.)

Painting leaves - four autumn activities with leaves

As autumn has arrived we started to collect leaves every time we went somewhere. We were talking about the gorgeous colours of autumn leaves like orange, yellow, brown or red. We also observe the different shapes like circular, heart-shaped, hand-shaped as well as their edges (smooth, wavy, toothed).

I checked this image from the net to make sure I do not say anything silly.

Leaf rubbing gave us the chance to have a look at the veins:

Leaf prints

Then we had painting fun. E. chose the colours (I tried to direct her to the autumn colours with little success) and we painted the backside of the leaves and made prints. At first, we used too much paint, but then we could observe the beautiful prints the veins and the edges gave out.

First try

Second try with less paint

Another painting activity- outine of leaves:

I pressed some leaves and stuck them on a white sheet of paper with the help of small pieces of Cello-tape. Then we painted the leaves over creating an outline. This was a hit with E.

And finally a counting game with leaves:

I drew these bare trees for E. It can serve as a simple counting activity. Your child needs to stick as many leaves on the tree as the number shows.

I've prepared printable trees you can download at the end of this post.

As simple counting is not a challenge for E. any more I thought skip counting would raise her interest much more. And I was right. 

Although it was a little too long an activity, she managed to finish it after my encouragement and help with the gluing. 

Gluing

Adding the leaves

creating a leaf face with the glue

Mommy, this leaf is ill

There are not enough branches for 8 leaves, Mommy

Placing the magnetic numbers - finished!

First, I pressed all the leaves. It's easier to work with them. Then I presented, showed and explained what to do with instructions like these:

• Hold your paper down with one hand and rub with the other hand. 
• Let's mix 2 colours.
• Paint the backside of the leaf, like this.
• You can add more glue this time because this leaf is big.

Finally, we displayed everything on our living room doors. E. shows her pieces of artwork to whoever comes to us.

And here on this link you can download the bare trees with numbers:

Autumn leaves - counting and sticking

Number games

I'd like to show you some (4) number games E. likes playing any time, any place. These activities cover number recognition, counting, colour matching and fine motor skills as well up to number 10. A little bit of skip counting is also involved.

1. Counting Caterpillar

As we are great fan of Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar, when I found this Counting Caterpillar Busy Bag I was more than delighted. The printable is free.

I've changed the pom-poms into small coloured stones. The reason for this change was I found the pom-poms too slippery on the laminated sheets.

So what I did:

• I printed the caterpillars from the site above

First, she put the cards in order from 1 to 10

• I laminated the cards
• I prepared the colourful stones in a little bowl 

Then she started to put the little stones on the body of the caterpillars. She paid close attention to the right colours. Pinching up the little stones really helps the hand muscles to strengthen

She was saying the numbers out loud while placing the counters

Sometimes she asked me to do it in turns.

I'll put on the last one.

2. Apple counting

This activity is a part of the fruit unit among the various great free printables from Welcome to Mommyhood. (You can find the printables at the bottom of the blog post and the apple tree activity is on page 12. This printable is also free of charge)

3. Ice-cream counting fun

With the summertime here we just couldn't avoid some ice-cream activities this summer either.

The FREE printable of this Ice-cream counting activity can be found on one of my favourite educational resource pages: The Measured Mom.

Just go to the page above and print the ice-cream and number cards (laminate them for durability - optional) and the counting can begin.

Counting the candies on the ice-cream

placing the right number on the cone

You can finish this activity with licking some ice-cream.

4. Count the coloured sticks


Colours have always been E.'s favourite. So we started matching colours quite early, when she was 13-14 months old. This activity involves colour sorting and counting as well. A year ago I made these coloured paper rolls for sorting colourful objects.

First, I put number 1, 2, 3 and 4 in front of each paper rolls and E. needed to put the exact number of coloured sticks in the right place. Then came the idea of skip counting:

If you liked these games, check out my earlier posts about numbers:

•  Bottle top calculator

• Watermelon seeds counting, number memory game, building a wall of numbers

If you still want some more, have a look at my 123-number games collection on pinterest.

Hungarian National Holiday- March 15

One of the biggest national holidays in Hungary is the commemoration of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. As it is filled with national feelings and politics I won't go into details about history and other stuff but I'd like to show how we prepare for it in our home (this year together with St. Patrick's Day)

The activities we have done are in mainly Hungarian.

How do we prepare for a Hungarian and an Irish celebration at the same time? We are sharing time between English and Hungarian. Let's say in the morning we do tasks in English concerning St. Patrick's Day. In the afternoon we spend time in Hungarian doing some fun activities around the Hungarian Revolution. Or the other way round.

We display the art E. makes on our double doors in the living-room.

One wing is dedicated to the Hungarian Revolution, the other one to St. Patrick's Day.

St. Patrick's Day door wing on the left, Hungarian Revolution door wing on the right

In this way she is not confused at all.

I'd like to list some ideas I found online or we made up ourselves concerning our national holiday. This blog wouldn't be complete without our Hungary/the Hungarian language related happenings.

Luckily, last year I made our own button cockade. There's nothing to do with it this year. We'll just pin them on our coat on 15 March. (I hope I'll find them)

E.'s coat and cockade from 2014

It is made out of 3 buttons: a big red, a smaller white and a little green button. I sewed them together with a pin like these:

Colouring the flag is the most traditional way children prepare for this holiday. We put some fun into it. Thank Goodness for dot markers!

When she saw the sheet E. asked me who wrote there "MAGYAR ZÁSZLÓ" (=Hungarian flag)

With dot markers all kinds of colouring is more fun. E. did some more of it (colouring a KOKÁRDA=cockade, for example)

Daddy and E. were colouring in full fling so I printed them a map of Ireland and they coloured it too. You can see it in the top picture on the St Patrick's side. (They didn't really care about Northern Ireland. We'll put things to rights next year, when she'll be more capable of understanding it.)

Red, white and green are used in almost all of our activities. I bought some decor stones in a One Euro Shop (I had to separate the red, white and green stones from many other colours)
We printed the map of Hungary and made up a kind of patterning activity.

The stones had to be placed along the borderline as on the Hungarian flag (red, white, green) making a pattern ABCABC. This pattern is difficult for my daughter to follow so it was quite a strenuous exercise for her.

I'm concentrating like there's no tomorrow

It was a long activity and towards the end it was difficult for her to concentrate. This is quite understandable, she's not even 3. But Daddy was there for her.

Pinterest offers a lot of wonderful ideas for the occasion. For instance, this pom-pom garland with the national colours. (Through the link you can read about the detailed explanation how to make a pom pom with the help of a fork)

What you need:

• red, white, green (and orange) yarn
• a fork
• scissors

E. tried to make a pom-pom, but she couldn't. Maybe half a year later she'll understand how to do it and will be able to make it. We'll give it a try again.

So I made the pompoms myself....

At first, she was just playing with the yarn.

then she was cutting the yarn like a maniac :)

She cut the yarn for 25-30 minutes and I could finish the garland with the Hungarian colours only.

The next day I made the pom-poms for the Irish garland and she was .... *surprise, surprise* cutting the yarn. She can't get bored of it. E. kept asking: - What I'm doing? which I rephrased:- What am I doing? And then she answerd her own question after having repeated it correctly. - I'm cutting yarn. 
This short conversation was repeated for 8-10 times without any alternation.

We've hung our pom-pom garlands (with the Irish and the Hungarian national colours) on the double doors.


Tricolour Pizza

Your toddler ALWAYS wants to help you with cooking, not to mention the great excitement if you make pizza. Why not in tricolour? Everybody loves pizza and it's easy to make it with a toddler.

It's not our pizza, but it's coming soon

Red= tomato sauce with some basil and oregano (minced meat if you wish)
White= loads of grated cheese
Green= broccoli, spinach or any other green vegetables in our case it'll be ruccola

The lollipop stick is optional, too... but don't they look cool? Like real flags :)

We are making our own on the 15th so I can upload photos of the process later.

I still have some activities up my sleeve, however, I'm not sure we'll have time for them. Anyways, I'll have to share some ideas next year too.