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Toca Store

Toca Store encompasses all the creativity and complexity of play that Toca Boca is becoming known for.

Toca Store triggers your child’s imagination and inspires role-playing. This app takes advantage of your child’s natural exploration of everyday life to help them to develop social and mathematical skills.

Toca Store provides a wonderful opportunity to discuss money and your family values. Your child’s job is to run a store acting as either the storekeeper or shopper. Your child will learn about making choices, counting and money. The storekeepers job is to stock the shelves, tend the register and set prices. The shopper gets to shop with a bag full of coins.  We recommend using it with two children but it easily engages one child playing both roles. It’s really fun for you to play along or to use when a friend comes over.

Several of the children we tested this app with quickly started negotiating and discussing the value of the products while deciding if it was worth paying the storekeepers prices. They were also thinking about how much they really wanted the item. It was interesting and I must tell you I had difficulty keeping a straight face.

Activity 1: Mega Game Board

Enlarge your favorite board games with these simple tips! Life-sized fun that the whole family can create and play together.

What You’ll Need:

• Small cardboard boxes.
• Construction paper.
• Mural paper.
• Tape.
• Markers.

This is not a simple pick up and play project, but one that will create hours of joy! Pull out a favorite board game. Lay out all the pieces and brainstorm how to recreate the game using the objects listed above.

Tape the mural paper down on a flat surface to make the perfect game board. Cardboard boxes can be transformed with construction paper to make life-sized dice. Small toys your child has can make fun game pieces.

Feeling really creative? Make your own game by creating “chance” cards. Cut out rectangles of construction paper. Write out favorable and negative things that are meaningful to your child with a reward or consequence for each. Ideas: “Helping walk the dog. Move ahead 2 spaces”, “Didn’t do your homework. Go back 2 spaces”.  Add in “tasks” cards for even more fun! Ideas: “Give everyone in the room a hug. Move ahead 1 space for every hug”, “Tell a funny joke. Move ahead 3 spaces”.

Activity 2: Build a Fort

I read an article from Scholastic titled: Why All Kids Should Build Forts. As an adult who still loves fort building, it seemed like the perfect article to share.

All you need are some blankets and a designated spot in the house for safe building. Chairs, couches, pillows, beds, tables…the fun is endless! When it looks like the fort is almost complete drop off some flashlights, books, toys, or a snack and lots of praise for all the hard work your children just did.

Faces iMake

After reviewing Faces iMake with other educators and playing with children it is clear that this is an extraordinary tool for developing right brain creativity and expanding awareness in a really fun way.

Faces iMake is a modern day take on Mr. Potato Head: a past generations’s mainstay toy for creative play. Yet, Faces iMake is much more fun. This app uses images of everyday objects which you manipulate to create colorful and silly pictures. Each picture created can be easily saved and shared.

Faces iMake was developed with artist, children’s book author and educator Hanoch Piven. It is based on the highly acclaimed creative workshops he has conducted in schools and kindergartens all around the world. Priven thoughtfully added short and entertaining lessons in the app to help children learn how to use each tool and get lots of ideas.

Activity 1: Edible Paint

There are lots of ways to make edible paint, here are a few easy recipes to try:

• Instant pudding + food coloring
• Light corn syrup + food coloring
• Sweetened condensed milk + food coloring

All you need to do is put a small amount of each liquid into a small bowl and mix in as much food coloring as you want. Natural food coloring works well too. Make sure to have lots of paper or a easy to clean surface ready!

Finger painting with edible paint is a wonderful sensory experience. Well cleaned paintbrushes or stamps work well too. Be careful with the food coloring as it can stain. Enjoy creating pictures, watching the colors change and the best part – licking your fingers!

Check out Play At Home Mom to see some great pictures to inspire you to make and use edible paint. You will also find many more hands-on, sensory activities.

Activity 2: Stories iMake

Take your creative faces and turn them into starring characters for your child’s stories.

What You’ll Need:

• Your device
• Printer
• Folder

As you complete each face in Faces iMake, save it to photos or email it to yourself. Print out your picture and add it to a “faces binder” or put it in a folder your child can easily access. By creating a collection of faces your child has a set of their work to play with and tell stories about.

Use smaller pictures to make magnets for the fridge. Print them out on card stock and add a body outline to create personalized playhouse characters. We love how the work your child does on Faces iMake can be included into free play time at home!

My Word Wall

My Word Wall is a first-rate phonics apps. It contains four well-designed games with over 75 sight words and 12 word families. Your beginning reader will have a great time practicing spelling, phonics and overall wordplay.

Your child will work on identifying beginning sounds, word puzzles, word families, matching words to pictures and general vocabulary building. Short, concise directions are given in each game and there are no hints as the games are designed for your child to discover the answers with out “buzzing” every error made. We love how My Word Wall caters to multiple learning styles.

Activity 1: Write it – Roll it – Read it

Get ready parents…it’s time to bring out the playdough!

What You’ll Need:

• Playdough. Try out this recipe for more fun.
• Writing Paper.
• Wax Paper.
• Permanent Marker.

Playdough activities are excellent for young children because they create the perfect opportunity for fine-motor development and creativity. Parents all you need to do for this activity is be the writer for your child.

Lay out the writing paper and ask your child to think of some words they want to create. Choose words they just finished in My Word Wall or a favorite book to spark some ideas. Write the words out on the paper with dark thick lines.

Let your child create a little drawing next to the words to help them remember each word. Lay the wax paper on top of your writing paper. Create each word by rolling out “snakes” of playdough. Sit next to your child and help them think about each sound. Make the sounds for each letter often and encourage them to try too. Don’t forget to save your word sheet so your child can get it out to work on independently.

Activity 2: Games for Flashcards

Support your classroom teacher by knowing what letters and word families (or spelling patterns) your child is working on at school. Use these fun games to play and learn more at home.

Children are learning new words and making connections about language and reading patterns every day. The more you can do to support vocabulary and language learning at home, the more successful your child will be at transferring these positive experiences to school. Parents are the first and best teachers their children have.

What You’ll Need:
• Letter or word family flashcards (and index cards and markers work too).

One great way to use the flashcards you have sitting around the house is to take a few with you on a trip to the store or in the car. Pull out the flashcards and instead of just asking your child what is on it, play 20 questions or any other describing game. Get creative, let the game evolve based on the moods, energy or creativity of your family.

My favorite game starter questions are:

• I am thinking of a word that has the letter/word family ____.
• I have a letter (don’t tell but it’s: G) in my hand that is in the words pig, plug, game…
• Can you guess my letter? no peeking…
• Let’s think of words that are in this word family. (Go around the car and the last one to name a word wins!)
• Jump when you see the letter ____.

My First Tangrams

We have selected My First Tangrams to show how families can have fun while learning geometry. Your entire family will delight in using this ancient Chinese logic game on a 21st century device.

What is a tangram? A Tangram begins with a square which is then cut into seven standard pieces. Each is called a tan. In creating a picture, all seven tans must touch but not overlap.

The first reference to tangrams are from ancient China when tangrams were used in storytelling. The storyteller placed the tans in the shape of the characters. As the story unfolded and new characters or story elements were introduced, the puzzle pieces were rearranged.

This app is an adaptation. Rules have been simplified to allow every child to solve all 36 increasingly challenging Tangrams. Each picture comes to life as the shapes are placed on top, similar to a puzzle.

In the first game you drag and place colored shapes from the bottom of the screen to identical non-colored shapes to make a complete picture. The next challenge is to create the picture without the shape hints. Looking at a small completed Tangram, build the picture by dragging and placing each colored shape onto a blank space.

Enjoy the “creation mode” where children have fun creating and sharing their own pictures. Tangrams are a great way for young children to learn about shapes, colors and build spatial reasoning skills.

Activity: Make Your Own Tangram Story

Make a set of your own tangrams and start storytelling. A great activity for cold winter days when you can’t be outside building snow castles.

What You’ll Need:

• Three copies of this home set of tangrams
• Scissors, crayons or markers
• Lots of imagination!

After playing with My first Tangrams, encourage the storyteller in your family to create their own picture and story. Have the tangram pattern printed and ready for cutting and coloring. Cut out each shape and let your child start coloring. Try to use a new color for each of the seven tans. Spread out all seven tans and start storytelling.

Young children might start by creating pictures to retell familiar stories. They need much more support streaming a story together but do enjoy playfully creating silly pictures with their family. Have them build a tangram, glue it onto paper and write out their story with the help from the whole family.

Older children will be much more independent in their storytelling. New story ideas can be inspired by other tangram stories found in books.

Starfall Gingerbread

Starfall Gingerbread by Starfall Education is a creative way to learn about shapes and patterns.

Children learn shapes as they are prompted to decorate a boy or girl gingerbread cookie with different shapes and colors, all done in a story format. Your child saves their gingerbread cookie creations on a baking sheet and then chooses a favorite cookie to run through a maze, jumping along on the same shape or on repeating shape patterns. Challenge is added as the maze changes each time you play.

Starfall Gingerbread introduces beginning repeating patterns for your child to follow. Looking for patterns prepares the mind to search out and discover similarities that bind seemingly unrelated information together. Starfall Gingerbread encourages young children to see relationships between parts of an objects and the whole.

A child with experiences looking for patterns becomes a more persistent and flexible problem solver. They expect a problem to be solvable. When the first solution does not work, they keep looking until they find one that works. Their calmness is based on the knowledge that there is an answer to be found. This is a good “Lifetime Learning” skill.

Starfall Gingerbread is truly learning disguised as fun.

Find out how well your child understands shapes and patterns with these two hands-on activities.

Activity 1: Gingerbread Shape Book

Create a Gingerbread Shape Book for your home library!

What You’ll Need:
• Paper
• Markers or Crayons

The text for each page is:

Gingerbread, Gingerbread, run, run, run.
I give you a (add shape name here) just for fun!

Make a page for each shape. Draw the outline of a gingerbread cookie with a smile on each page. Have your child choose a shape and then add that shape for the eyes, nose and buttons. Have your child write or trace the shape word in each sentence blank. Create a colorful cover page and add this book to your child’s home library!

Activity 2: Potato-Stamped Paper

A traditional craft project to help your child learn more about patterns! Use this time to see what kinds of patterns your child is most comfortable with.

What You’ll Need:

• Paints
• A sponge, cut in half
• A knife
• A potato or sponge to transfer the paint print
• Paper

Step 1: Cut the potato in half.

Step 2: Draw a shape onto a piece of paper that is the same size as the round part of the potato you just cut (make it easy by tracing the outer rim of the potato onto the paper for the right size).

Step 3:  Place the paper on the potato and cut around the outside of the shape. Cut far enough down so that the shape stands out away from the rest of the potato.

Step 4: Place the sponges on small plates and add paint to each sponge. Have your child tap the shape side of the potato in the paint and create patterns on large sheets of paper, newspaper or butcher paper.

The first patterns that children usually can repeat are AB patterns. They might repeat colors (red-blue-red-blue-red-blue) or shapes (circle-square-circle-square-circle-square). Other patterns your child might use are ABB (red-blue-blue), AAB (red-red-blue) or ABC (red-blue-green). Patterns can be anything your creative child decides they want to make! The important thing is that the pattern repeats over and over without changing.