Sweeping Up ABCs and Numbers: A Game for Kids!

Guest blogger Sarah Noftle of How Wee Learn gets kids “sweeping up” with a simple and active learning game!

One of the millions of reasons that I love to work with young children is how excited they are about almost anything.

Dishes? Woohoo!

Vacuuming? Please, please Mama can I have a turn?!

Dusting? Bring it on!

I was so excited to spot a child sized mop, broom, duster, dustpan, and vacuum from Melissa & Doug. Now my little helpers can help alongside me, instead of hijacking my tools. Meaning we just might get some cleaning done!

Well, maybe.

Or maybe we will use that broom, dustpan, and vacuum for some learning filled fun.

Yes, that sounds much more realistic.

Both of my boys loved playing with that vacuum as I set the activities up. They were completely mesmerized by the fact that it really sucked up the tokens. My 4 year old thought it was pure magic, while my 6 year old promptly flipped it over to figure out exactly what was going on. Pretty soon he declared it was indeed magic.

While the boys were investigating the magic vacuum, I popped some letters on the wooden tokens. I wrote letters on paper and taped them to the tokens. Since this was an activity for my youngest, I used his name letters B, e, n and then threw in a few other letters as well.

The idea behind the game was very simple and aimed to help him play with letter recognition. I called out a letter, he vacuumed it up!

We changed the game a little as we went along. I asked him to vacuum up his name in order, call out the letter sounds, and then finally call out other words that start with the letter he was about to vacuum.

He smiled the entire time. This busy little guy of mine was having so much fun learning those letters!

Sam is practicing skip counting right now. I thought of an activity that would get his body moving as he was differentiating between numbers and placing them in order.

I wrote the numbers that occur while counting by 5s to 100 on paper and cut them up. Sam’s job was to sweep up the numbers in order. He used the little broom and swept them all up!

This could of course be used in so many different ways: sweeping up numbers in order, sweeping up the alphabet, sweeping up sight words or names, even sweeping up certain shapes or colors.

We certainly know how to use our cleaning tools for fun and learning – maybe we will actually use them for cleaning soon!