candy heart patterns

For the last few days, we've been doing a lot of hanging out by the fire (which is what you have to do when you have no electricity in the house).

We've also been breaking our backs trying to shovel three feet of the world's heaviest snow on record, we've been doing a lot of sledding, and we've been crossing our fingers that we can still make it to Disney mid-week.

One of these mornings we spent a little bit of time with a game that Owen has waited weeks to play:

• Valentine Hearts Game: That's what Owen's been calling it; it's really a very simple pattern matching game that he played at his preschool Valentine's Day party last year, but he loves it.
  

the Valentine heart game prep

I kept this really simple--I cut large Post-It Notes into fours and cut small squares from a few tablets I had around the house (so that I had pieces of pink, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple paper). I glued them to the paper and slid the paper in a plastic sleeve.

And kiddos can use gumdrops or Valentine heart candies (or really anything) to match the patterns.

Cora is telling me her pattern: blue, pink, blue, pink, blue. . .

Maddy and Owen really liked this because of the candy they ate after they completed a whole pattern. It was way too easy for them, just matching the colors of the candy to the squares, so I had them tell me how the pattern would continue--and that added more of a challenge.

I also had them create their own patterns once they finished, and I think they liked that second only to eating the candy.

But for Cora, it was a great opportunity to help her practice beginning the pattern on the left and moving to the right (like the left to right and return sweep that is also covered with grid games). I ended up putting a tiny heart sticker at the top left of the pattern page so she knew where to start.

It was also good for her to work on completing a task--finishing each pattern--not just plopping down a candy here and there.

Matching the colored candy to the squares continued her work with color-identification, which was a little more difficult because these were pastels, but she did fine.

So that was that--a super-easy, super-sweet pattern game to distract us from the cold, to buy some time before we could head out on our new sleds, and to sneak in a little bit of learning on an otherwise dark and snowy morning.