Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Birthday Candles and Number Recognition

>

"Wasabi" is turning 15 today and, since our birthday candles get quite a workout around here, I decided to buy some nice shiny new ones.  Well I wasn't prepared for how excited Alleluia would be about the sparkly "1" and "5" candles we found at Target!


She had to ride home with them in the car (along with a new dog leash) and rocked them like little babies.  We practiced singing Happy Birthday and, by the time we got home, the fact that it wasn't HER birthday--but her sister's instead--had finally sunk in. 

Speaking of "sunk-ing in" the wax candles reminded me of playing that "Float/Sink" game last week, where we used a spider to scoop out the ping pong balls that floated, we saw that feathers could float, and these little wax ducks and planes that Chop makes out of the wax from her lunchbox cheese--they floated, too.

So when we got home we did a quick Number Recognition game where we floated all of the birthday candles in a bowl of water (you can use the bathtub, the kitchen sink or a baby pool) and I asked her to pull out different numbers.  It was definitely way beyond her 2-year-old brain for now, but she knows "5" alright!


She was SO taken with this silly little game (which lasted less than 10 minutes!) that she took the stuff inside and wanted to try to sort the numbers.  Again, number sequence is WAY beyond her right now, but it was interesting to see her match two numerals that were of a different style.  It was also funny to see that she doesn't realize when some of the numbers are upside down or backwards.


The candles we'll use tonight had toothpicks sticking out of the bottom, so if we do this again I'll either snip those off or buy candles without the pokies.


Who knew birthday candles could be so much fun?

1 comment:

  1. This is such a great idea! I love how creative you are!

    ReplyDelete