When my sons were little and just learning their colors, we would often paint with only one color on wet paper, often called the wet-on-wet technique, which allowed the color to range from strong and bold to soft and light all in one stroke. After many, many of such paintings, we found ourselves with a lot of pretty paper. It became too much of a good thing, so I set out to think of other uses for the colorful paper. I found several ways to reuse the paper and one of our favorites is making number cards.
I cut up the watercolor papers into 3" x 4" then wrote 3 inch tall numbers on each card. Next came the challenging part; using my very limited artistic skills, I drew plant, birds, stars, etc. to correspond to the number. Soy & beeswax crayons, like the ones pictured from A Toy Garden, are bold enough to stand out on the watercolor paper. In the end I also did a sign for each of the four processes (+ - x ÷ ), = and an extra #1.
Little Shane likes to count the objects on the card to make sure they match the number, while Aidan practices his math facts with the cards. We can also use them as story prompts for Aidan who is learning creative narration. For example: On a clear sunny day (card #1) I went walking in a forest (#3) and saw birds hopping all around (#8). When I went to investigate...
