Marshmallow Game

There are days that my dear children seem to have no desire to learn. I can't say that I blame them - after all, there are much more fun things to do than learn letters, numbers, words, etc.  But, I'm determined to teach them the discipline of hard work and cultivate in them a desire to learn new things.  Unfortunately, my determination can at times come out as frustration. I can easily get frustrated if they do not understand something and try to force them to "get it." Nice quality, I know.  So, now I'm trying to come up with new ways to make learning fun around here - almost as if they don't even know they are learning something new.

First up, the marshmallow game. We've been working on numbers, so I made a bunch of flash cards with about 60 numbers on them. I just set a group of numbers on the table and let them toss a small marshmallow at the group. If they know the number it lands on, they get to eat the marshmallow.  Clearly, we don't do all the numbers every time (that would be too many marshmallows), but it's amazing how quickly they learned the numbers with a little sweet incentive.  Look at these happy faces just learning away....

This game can be adapted to a variety of subjects, so I thought I'd pass it along in case any of your kiddos just need a little prodding in the direction of learning something new.  I hope it works for you like it did for me!