Christmas Exercise Cards

I have two very active boys and am constantly trying to come up with energetic activities for us. Now that we are spending more time inside its getting a little harder to stay active. I've seen the idea for making cards with exercises on them before and thought I would make some with a Christmas twist.

 I was going to type them on the computer but we are out of ink. So I decided to use some of the giant stack of paint samples I have left from our bathroom redo. You could type these or use construction paper or index cards. On each card I wrote the exercise and added a Christmas sticker that went with the exercise. You could use clip art or a drawing or leave the stickers off all together.

Here are the exercises I came up with:

• Make "snow" angels on the floor.
• Jump up and pretend to hang ornaments.
• March while singing Jingle Bells
• Thumpity, thump, thump like Frosty the Snowman
• Reach up high to the stars
• Bend and stretch into the shape of a candy cane.
• Pretend to climb the chimney like Santa.
• Run as fast as you can in place like the gingerbread man.
• Say "Ho, ho, ho!" and shake your belly like Santa.
• Waddle like a penguin.
• Prance like a reindeer.
• March like the Little Drummer Boy
• Crouch down low then pop up like a jack-in-the-box.

To add some counting practice after the boys pull a card I hold up the number of fingers for the number of times we are going to do the exercise. Then they count how many fingers and count as we do the exercise. I also let them have a turn to hold up their fingers for how many times they would like to do an exercise. You could also roll dice or pull number cards.

How Many Apples Game

This week in school L's class is doing an apple theme and working on counting. When I saw a few versions of apple tree counting such as this one:

http://www.amazingmess.com/2011/09/learning-bag-apple-tree-number-game.html 

I thought I'd make one too.

Here's my version:

I have a bunch of file folders I'm trying to reuse so I used one as my background and made a tree out of green scrap paper and crayon. You can make your tree out of anything you have on hand or print one out from clip art.

I made number cards by writing the number and drawing the correct number of apples underneath. You could put the apples on back of the card or just write the number.  My guys are just learning their numbers and I wanted them to connect the number to the right number of objects.

I folded the cards and placed them in a bin with pom pom apples. Then its time to play!

Pick a card and place the right number of apples on the tree. We took turns and sang "How many apples on the apple tree?" when we picked a card.

 L decided he needed some one to pick the apples so he went and got a Little People lady off the shelf.

After we played the game L decided to add the apple tree to our farm table to play with independently.