This is a busy bag set AND a homeschooling counting manipulative. Although my youngest doesn't exactly use it the way I want her to use it yet, she does love to match up the patterns. So I guess it has many uses?
You could really make this out of paper to, but I used felt. My sweet cousin bought my kindergartner a felt board for Christmas, so we are putting it to good use.
I picked up some light brown and "sprinkle" felt from Hobby Lobby and added with what I had in my stash. I used a light brown for the cones and Neapolitan colors for the ice cream. I needed more ice cream colors, so added white and am now looking for "chocolate chip mint." It took 8 sheets ($2.00 if I had to buy them full price.)
I used these Accucut dies that I had in my supply
I ended up using the pennant shape for the cone bases because the actual cone has the looped edges and I wanted them flat. I just cut off the tabs. I die cut 11 cone bottoms. I thought about double layering them and stitching on the waffle cone pattern, but then I came to my senses and realized these were for a 3 year old.
The numbers were cut from black scrap felt with a wafer number die that I borrowed from a friend. I glued them on with Aileen's fabric glue. (I tried a few different kinds of glue, and this worked the best.) There is no bleeding through of the glue, but I was careful about how much I used. She's had the set for a couple of weeks and the numbers are still on....we will see how long it takes before she starts "picking" at them. :)
She can count her numbers already, but we are working on visual recognition and then putting them in order. I also count together with her as she adds the scoops.
I need to cut more scoops as I didn't intend for her to do them all at the same time. I'm glad that this set has many uses and will be used for awhile.
At this point she has more fun matching up the scoop colors than counting them, but that's fine with me!
Oh and she does pretend to eat them, too.
My next project....cupcake alphabet matching!
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