Long time ago, when I didn’t know better, I bought a ton of flash cards thinking I can teach my kids using those. Well, you can guess how that went, right? Usually ends up with our favorite game, “It’s raining It’s pouring flash cards!” How do we play with flash cards? While holding that thought, I set out the box.

During the day, Daddy B started building card houses with the flash cards. Big A was enthralled and she actually controlled her desire to smash them. Baby A – not much control there. Boom! The house bit the dust. Big A was excited with building houses with cards. But she was more excited to stack them in her sandbox as it was more easier to make them stand on sand box than on the floor.

Out we went with a pack of flash cards to our trusty sandbox.

Big A started building a wall to protect all her animals, while baby A was burying her cards in the sand. Territory issues did crop up between the girls which eventually sorted itself.

Lot of imaginative play with many story lines happened for a while.  Great for vocabulary and creative thinking. When the steam wore off, Big A took down her cards and started stacking them in vertical lines and said the animals are having a race.

By the time she was done arranging all her animals, I guess she lost track of what she had initially thought because it turned out to be a Prey and Predator hunting game.

Hermivores (herbivores) and carnivores were lined up.

That I thought was a great exercise for her- separating the plant eaters and the meat eaters.

Out of practice I started building shapes with the cards and tried to get Baby A into it.  We did work on a few basic shapes with the cards.

Big Sister showed her architectural skills and created some cool houses.

After a short break spent on another  toy activity, they came here and build some tents for their tiny friends.

You know what the irony is, Big A was trying to read the words on the flash cards while she was building/playing with them. At one point, she was actually looking for a lion flash card to put her animal next to it. That gave me an idea for next time.

Build a zoo and match the words on the flash cards (pictureless side of course) to the respective animal.

Easy clean up, since we had dry sand – very rare because we apparently always have a lake in our sand box.

For more sandbox play ideas, look at this post.

[box title=”Learning de jour” color=”#880707″]

• Vocabulary via story telling.
• Good dose of creativity.
• Understanding of basic shapes (for the baby).
• Animal categories – understanding of the prey and predators.
• Translating a 2 dimensional drawing of a house to 3-dimensional one using cards.

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Thanks for reading

Happy sharing

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