Just for FUN! {with some learning sprinkled in, lol}

We pride ourselves on raising our children to be very loving and very smart! But, I can admit that I tend to be a bit too "serious" and am really learning how to move away from so much structure and just allow the kids to have FUN! I regret having to "grow up" way too fast as a child and never getting to have fun and just be a kid without a care in the world. 

We always want our children to have a natural curiosity about life and learning and always love to learn! Plus, we know that children's play is children's work, so we want them to have fun at learning and also know how to take care of themselves and a home some day--should God bless them to be wives and mothers.

One of the things we have implemented is {High Touch Tuesday}! But, in general, I am looking for new ways to continue to infuse more FUN into our every day learning. I also have to balance that with our children's individual learning styles. Elle is a very structure-oriented student. She LOVES worksheets, hands-on learning and getting her answers "right." Em on the other hand is ALL about moving!! Her style is very active and tactile. She is definitely a kinesthetic learner! She is all about the DOING part of learning!! This can be a challenge and I make an extra effort to tailor our girls' lessons to accommodate each of their learning styles.

Here is a cartoon that made me laugh. Click on it to enlarge it.

So, here are a few of our fun learning games that I have implemented. I was inspired for this first one by Mama Jen here.  It is a file folder game focusing on the alphabet. We use it in all kinds of ways. Elle has been using it to match to animal names based on the spelling of the name. Em uses it to match capital and lower case letters as well as try to guess at the animal names. It has really been a great game for our girls--they both really enjoy playing it!

 It's funny to see how Em (27 mos) ALWAYS starts with M as her first letter;)

The other fun activity is a math game I came up with. We have the girls roll the jumbo dice and then Elle adds the dice together and gets the 

corresponding number of manipulatives to match. 

In this case, Em rolled 2+4=6(and called out the numbers), so Elle got 2 acorns and 4 gems and added them up! 

It is a lot of fun for everyone!

We have also been using the dice in our gross motor skills activities to determine the number of jumps, hops, skips etc each person (Mommy included) has to do. It is a great way to get some important exercise (especially now that it is cold here) 

and also get math lessons in.

What other fun ideas are you all using?? I need some inspiration in this department;-)

Blessings,