National Puzzle Day: Why Puzzles?

Brain Health & Puzzles explains the importance of puzzles for learning, maintaining, and improving your brain.  Puzzles improve our focus, attention, flexibility, and memory.  

Most students also think they are fun, so puzzles are a great way to sneak in extra learning and skill review!

Maria has devoted an entire site to solving number puzzles.  The site, The Math Mom's Puzzles, focuses on math that is applicable to life.

According to Ann Bower's article, Teaching With Puzzles, puzzles made of wood or heavy cardboard are effective for encouraging motor skills in children ages 1-8. For older children, jigsaw puzzles with small cardboard pieces encourage problem solving skills.

Lisa's Craft Blog shares a fun snowflake craft your children may enjoy making today out of puzzle pieces.  

Grandmother Hen used craft sticks to create Remember When puzzles.  These would be nice to also use as story starters.

Happy Birthday Mozart

Arts Alive has put together a resource packet for teachers to use when exploring the life and music of Mozart.

Bright Hub Education has a Kindergarten lesson plan for introducing students to Wolfgang Mozart.  The lesson objective states:

The objective of this Mozart lesson plan for kindergarten is to provide students with an introduction to this classical composer through discussion and hands-on activities. At the end of this lesson, children will have an understanding of what classical music is and know who Mozart (among other composers) was.

Making Music Fun has a home school lesson plan to be used in teaching students about Mozart. You will find a printable word search and multiplication practice sheet at the link.

Make a special treat in honor of his birthday - a Mozart cake.

Read excerpts from The Official Weblog of W.A. Mozart.

The Music Kit has posted a list of children's books about Mozart.

Older students might like to try Mozart's Musical Dice Game for composing a minuet.


Share a familiar song with your children.  They may be surprised to learn that Mozart was the composer.

Learning About Australia in Honor of Australia Day

Mama Smiles is the host for a wonderful post written by another one of our favorite contributors, Elise.  The post is about exploring Australian geography and is a fantastic resource.

Counting Coconuts put together a Continent Bag full of activities for learning about Australia.

Inspiration Surrounds, Creativity Abounds shared some examples of activities she will do with her own children on Australia Day to teach them about their home.

Storytime Source Page shares a great list of book titles, flannel board activities, and songs about Australian Animals.  

Check out the official Australia Day website for more information if you are interested.

Bilingual Wednesdays - Brr..it is cold outside! part 2

Brr..it is cold outside- Part 2

Here we are working with snowmen. We love snowmen! Maybe because it never snows where we live, so we enjoy just playing with them in our games.

Snowhite was patterning here. Visual discrimination is an important skill. We learned about 

same / different  - igual / diferente

and here she was sorting snowmen by size

big/ small  -  grande/ pequeño

and her favourite games, puzzles!

you can download the second part here

Show and Tell #85

As part of their Little Mathematician series of posts, Raising the Cameran Clan rolled a giant die and graphed Trains.

Meremade is going to be practicing basic computation using a wooden math block.  The tutorial for making your own math block is included in the post.

Waddle-ah-chaa explains a Make Ten Math Game that uses a deck of playing cards.

It's your turn!

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If you are new to Show & Tell or need a quick recap, here are the rules:


~Post your favorite lessons, crafts, traditions, kid friendly recipes, field trip recap, learning games, experiments, DIY organizational projects, holiday related activities, or Ah-Ha moments.
~Direct link to your post, not your home page.
~Include a link back to us or include our link button in your post or sidebar.
~Please try to visit and comment on at least three links. This adds to the positive collaboration that makes our learning cooperative a success!
~Each week we will feature three links from the previous week's party.  Some weeks these are chosen at random, sometimes by theme, and other times according to linky tools stats.

Movement and Music: Heart Healthy for Valentine's Day

Each year around Valentine's Day I like to take some time to teach about how to help our hearts be healthy.  Everything seems to be centered around hearts at this time of year so it's great timing for some movement and music learning that's focused on making sure we have happy and healthy hearts.

Staying active is one of the best ways to help our hearts be healthy.  So today's music links are about active music-making, with some heart science and games at the end!

This one is, appropriately, "HEART and Soul."  Wouldn't it be fun to have a big piano to dance on like this?  Turn on some music and pretend your feet are making the tune like they do!


heart and soul

I think this "Stomp Song" is lots of fun.  Trying stomping your feet to the music.  You could use this song or any song that is fun to march around the room to make your own "stomp song."
Stomp Song

This is a famous "love song" that is great for kids to be able to recognize and name.  It is said that Beethoven loved Elise and wrote this song for her.  What kind of movements or dance does this song inspire in you?
"Fur Elise" (For Elise)
Learning is even more fun when your heart is involved and for some kids, the movement makes the learning happen even more efficiently.  So get ready to jump out of your chairs to learn!
These Heart-Heatlthy Games gets you moving around while you spell, learn the sounds of letters, and some Valentine Words--LINK to the games.

And for more about the science behind how our hearts work, check out this game and this site.
Try these fun ways to get your heart involved with your math:Math "exercises" are really exercises when you get up off your chair!

Greater/less than number recognition game: use a deck of cards to play "war." The number that is higher wins and kids take turns doing that many jumping jacks (or sit ups, etc.)
Exercise your Answer: When you find the answer to your addition, subtraction, or multiplication problem you can "exercise" the answer.  Take that many seconds to skip, jump, or dance.  Or do like above, and the answer to your math problem tells you how many jumping jacks or sit-ups to do.
For more fun Valentine's and movement ideas stop by This Little Project for the Music @ my House series.
Have fun taking music and movement to heart!  

Muffin Tin Playing, Learning, and Skill Reviewing Activities

Thanks to Michelle from Muffin Tin Mom, families all over the blog world are using tins for serving more than just muffins.

More than just for eating, muffin tins are a great tool for organizing materials and teaching basic skills in new and creative centers.

When starting a Lego project with her son, Muffin Tin Mom sorts the small pieces into muffin tins to make the project more manageable.

Making Learning Fun explains two early childhood games that use muffin tins to teach basic skills.
Using tins, picture cards, and pom poms preschoolers can practice visual discrimination.
The second game using tins, dice, and pom poms effectively practices counting and color recognition.

At Happy Brown House muffin tins and colorful foam stickers are the materials needed to practice sorting skills.

Growing Book by Book explains 4 great games for practicing literacy skills with elementary students: Toss and Answer, Match-a-Roo, Three in a Row, and Sort-a-Roo.

The Wonder Years encouraged collaging by providing interesting materials in a muffin tin.

Meaningful Mama uses coins, cards, and muffin tins for a skill review activity than can be adapted to whatever skill you are teaching.

Pre-K Pages used a muffin tin to create a magnet exploration station.

Here's to never having too many muffin tins in your collection!