It's no secret that there's probably not many houses in the westernised world that don't own a refrigerator, and for those homes that have young families, there's probably not many of those refrigerators that don't have magnetic letters or numbers on their doors. Somewhere, long, long ago, long before my children could even think of reading them, I purchased a big bucket of the things. I even tried them in the kitchen for awhile but was driven slightly batty by the fact that the girls seemed to want to play with them only when I was preparing dinner, which meant that they were standing right where I didn't want them to be saying 'look at this' right when I didn't really want to be looking at anything other than the meal I was pushing around my saucepan...So I took a trip to out local business store, and there I found some miniature magnetic boards, presumably for people who have tiny desks at work. To be honest, they would hold one A4 sheet of paper and that's about it, so their usefulness in an office is debatable, but the little blue and pink boards are light weight and perfectly sized for my girls.
Sometimes we use them with magnetic dress-up dolls Grandma bought us and have fashion shows, other times we line up numbers or letters for a bit of home-schooling, generally though the girls enjoy making pictures with an assortment of other magnetic pictures they have.
This week's school holiday magnetic mayhem? Fruit. See it? There's a banana, a strawberry and a carrot, of which I made with Mimi to 'show her how'. She them went on to make the blueberries, orange, lemon and 'fruit salad' all by herself - so proud - (her and me!)
So don't forget; magnetic letters and numbers are fun for literacy and numeracy; but they're also good for color sorting and matching, shape making, and well... just being a little bit silly! It's probably not a school-teacher approved activity, and I'm sure you won't find it in any school curriculum, but I think magnetic fruit is fabulous; and so do my girls!
