If you have taught little ones you know how important repetition is so we are constantly reviewing the basics in our Kinder school. My son learned his numbers since he was 3 years old but it always amazes me how often he forgets them even now at 5 years.
So we are constantly going over his numbers and alphabet in fun ways with games or activities that help make it stick. We played this game outdoors with our chalkboard but you can also do this inside and use your window. Just place a plastic table cloth or old shower curtain at the bottom and have him spray away!
You can totally do this in a classroom setting as well. When I taught preschool I always tried to do fun activities to help them learn and though sometimes it was a bit chaotic they quickly learned that in order to have fun activities we need to learn to follow directions–so they learned. I would always start with the rules and remind them over and over again and if one child would have trouble cooperating I’d ask him to sit for a second and watch how we did it so he can learn the directions and play.
With this activity your child gets fine & gross motor skills practice, numbers practice and Spanish practice all from this simple game!
Fun Game to Learn the Numbers: Numbers Car Wash
You need:
- car shaped foam
- spray bottle or water gun
- dry erase marker
- contact paper
How to play:
1. Place small squares of contact paper on your car shaped foamies. I just bought mine at the craft store but you can also make them if you want.
2. Wet the chalkboard surface and the stick the cars on the surface without using tape.
3. Then write your numbers, we only had 8 cars so we practiced our number 1-8 in order but we practiced high numbers when we did it out of order.
4. Fill your spray bottle with water and get ready to have fun. The spray bottle provides fine motor skills practice that they will need as they begin to write.
Spanish
- 1-uno
- 2- dos
- 3 – tres
- 4 – cuatro
- 5 – cinco
- 6 – seis
- 7 – siete
- 8 – ocho
- 9 – nueve
- 10- diez
We did ours in number order and then out of order. I called out the number “seis” and then he would wash the car. I did that until he got all of the numbers. I added numbers beyond 10 when we did it out of order. If you’re not familiar with Spanish but still want to include some Spanish in your child’s day I like this video that will help you learn the numbers in Spanish. It will also help if you’re a non-native speaker so you can pronounce the numbers the correct way. I also have our video below and we say the numbers in Spanish.
English –
I teach our little guy in English but we add in Spanish into curriculum as much as we can to get him to practice his Spanish. For the English version you would play the game the same way as I shared above–call out a number and have your child “wash” the car with the spray bottle.
Here’s a short video of our game!
VARIATIONS
Colors– Practice your colors once he washes all the numbers off the cars focus on the colors. You can do it the same way as above with the numbers and have him spray the colors that you call out.
Tag – Here is where you get some gross motor skills in and not to mention some exercise. My son loves this variation. Usually, I join in for the tag version of this game so he’s competing against someone. I call out a number or color and we race to tag it and then he says the color or number. Sometimes I move to another room of the house or further out in the yard so we can get some running in and get wiggles out!
