We recently went to a butterfly garden and to follow up on that theme I made a butterfly pick and cover activity for letter recognition and fine motor development. I printed the patterns on cardstock paper ... cut them out and then laminated them. 

I made both uppercase and lowercase letter mats along with letter cards.  In this activity the children pick a letter card and then cover up the same letter on the butterfly mat. Play continues until all letter have been covered.  You can use glass beads ... playdough ... pom poms ... buttons for the cover-ups.   

As of 2022 this activity can be found in the member's section which is also where I have added a shape matching activity.

We work in outdoor centers for part of the day today and for our math center I made a watermelon pick and count activity.  I free cut the watermelon pattern from red and green cardstock paper and glued them on to a sheet of blue cardstock paper.  I glued a blank square on the upper left corner of the watermelon mat and then laminated the mat.  I printed out the number squares and also laminated them.  You can find the patterns for both the watermelon and the number squares 1-30 here.

For our counters we used small black pom poms but you can also use black pony beads (remember to use supervision for children three and under and those still in the stages of putting small objects in their mouths).

Children picked a number card and put it in the blank square on the watermelon mat.  The next step was to put the same number of black pom poms on the water melon.  They continued until they had used all of the number cards. This is also an excellent activity for fine motor development.

You can see a video of this activity here or by clicking below:

I made this turtle roll and cover activity for the children to work on their number recognition skills.  I printed the patterns on cardstock paper and laminated them.  I attached self-adhesive magnets to the back of the cover up circles so that they would have a little more weight to them even though we did not use magnetic boards for this activity.

The children rolled the dice and then covered up the same number on the turtle mat.  Play continued until all of the numbers on the turtle mat had been covered up.  I made two different mats ... one with three sets of numbers 1-6 and another with numbers 2-12 that could be used with two dice.

You can see a video of this activity here or by clicking below:

We love working with playdough and today the children made pladough ice cream cones using a playdough mat I created for this activity.  They could use any color of playdough they wanted and they molded and pressed the playdough into a ice cream scoop shape and placed it on the mat.  They then took pony beads (which we also love) and pressed them into the ice cream cone.

You can see a video of this activity here or by clicking below: