I’ve seen these pony beads crafts online – most of them involve you melting them into a mold and making interesting jewellery, book marks, etc. While I like the idea I think my kids are too young for that, knowing them they will want to put things into the oven and touch the hot beads… ahhh thanks no my life is complicated enough!!
So I went ahead and picked up some beads at the store (about 200 pcs for like $2 – not too bad)
What to do with them though??
The package came with some string, so I assume it was for stringing (duh) but me bring me I didn’t want to just have them string some beads and make a necklace…oh no, no, no, I had to come up with some ‘math and pattern’ learning somehow 😀
So what did I do? I got some small plastic bowls from the kitchen – handy that they were all the same colour as the beads, and sat down ‘thing 1 & thing 2’ (it’s a joke I make with my kids :D) and told them: “here are some beads, we’re going to sort them into the different bowls matching the bowls colour with the bead colour”
Mr. O started to right away sort them, of course picking his favourite colour first (green) and only sorting those! With Miss. A I had to show her a bit about what I meant about putting each colour bead in the same coloured bowl, but she soon got the idea and they were both sorting up a storm!
After that I told them we would make a necklace, and gave them both a piece of string. Miss. A, I told her to just put the beads on however she liked, and whatever colour she wanted, she got down to it quickly!
With Mr. O I wanted to have him count, and make a pattern with the beads. So we started to talk about making a pattern, surprisingly he already knew what a pattern was and started to do it!
The pattern making didn’t last long but I was happy enough that he got the concept and was willing to try it!
While little Miss. A continued very diligently stringing the mostly pink beads, I got Mr. O to count how many beads he had on his string. He got up to twenty nine and then asked: “what comes next?” So I told him “Thirty” and he continued. This happened at each change in numbers, 40,50, etc. He counted up to 70! (yes there ended up that many on his string!)
After that we tied up the necklaces and the kids got to wear them!
Was a really fun project with little preparation and effort we explored lots of topics.
Colour recognition
Colour sorting
Counting
Patterning
Fine motor skills
thenaturalmommyfiles.wordpress.com 