In the lead up to Valentine's Day we have been playing with all things hearts! It's a great opportunity to use a different and fun material that the children are intrigued by to do some every day activities. Today we used some candy hearts to do counting and sorting.
What you'll need:
- candy hearts
- heart counters
- heart shaped trays (ice cube and cupcake)
I started by just setting up a little invitation to play for Ivy with a heart shaped ice cube tray and a little bowl full of love hearts sweets to let her explore on her own. She immediately started picking them up and placing them into the tray. Then I suggested that she count the hearts, which she was happy to do.
Her first time counting them she got all the way up to 16, which she's never done before, so I was very impressed! Although of course when I actually tried to make a video of her she didn't replicate it, but she still did very nicely count out the sweets.
She was so completely engrossed in the activity that I wanted to keep her playing by extending the challenges. First I gave her the larger heart shaped cupcake tray and put it alongside the ice cube tray. She started transferring the sweets over straight away, counting them again as she did.
For just under 2 years old Ivy is very good at counting, so to extend her a little bit I am trying to teach her how to count objects out one at a time (one-to-one correspondence). With this activity she continued to take handfuls of sweets and count them as one number, so to try and fix this I gave her some large wooden hearts, so that only one would fit into each space. This helped her to count out one at a time, and continue with the fun of counting out hearts.
This simple activity kept Ivy busy for ages, and could be extended and varied in many ways. The hearts could easily be sorted by colour into the different sections of the tray to add an extra element of fun and learning for older children.
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