Other Uses

As you can probably tell, one of my passions is researching and doing educational activities with the kids.  I am always on the lookout for something new and fun to try with them.  I love buying and teaching them how to use educational toys.  For some of the harder concepts, I like to buy/make several different activities that build on or teach on areas of interest using different methods.  We have a few sets of stringing beads that have always been popular in our house.  Sometimes it's great to see toys used in another manner to work on other things as well.  A quick activity that the girls enjoyed was naming the colours of the beads and placing them on the paper that matched their colour.  It was neat to see them self correct if they placed a colour on the wrong page and was interesting to see how much fun they had.  Once they were all finished we noticed that Joshua had gone over to the page and then organized each page of colours by shape as well.  All this to say that some of the really great learning toys can be used in multiple fashions.