Pot O’ Gold Hunt

My little guy loved our Hide-and-Two Activity and Groundhog's Day Hunt, so he thought this activity was even cooler... because it involved MONEY. He is a little obsessed with money right now.

Materials Needed: Yellow felt, something round to trace, Sharpie black marker, large piece of colorful paper, scissors, and a bag to hold the money.

Directions:
1. Start by tracing around a cup (or something else round) to make ten felt circles. Cut out the felt circles. This is your GOLD.

2. Trace ten circles onto a colorful piece of paper.

3. Label each circle on your paper from 1-10.

4. Write numbers 1-10 on your felt circles as well.

5. Go hide the GOLD (yellow felt circles) while your child covers their eyes and counts (younger kids can just cover their eyes or stay in another room).

6. Give your child a bag or basket to use for collecting their GOLD and send them off. Because we've played similar games so often, I didn't have to do any modeling for this activity. If your child isn't familiar with this sort of game, demonstrate how they look for the GOLD and put it in their bag when they find it.

7. While we looked for the GOLD I would tell my son what number was on each piece when he found it.

8. Once we found all ten pieces of GOLD, we went over to our Pot-O-Gold Hunt board and matched the numbered GOLD pieces to the numbered circles.

I modeled what to do the first time and my son counted for me up to ten. Then I let him try all by himself. He made it to four and then wanted me to do the rest... so he counted along with me while I matched the numbers. For older kids, they will be able to do this by themselves and you could probably go up to twenty, or you could do skip counting by 2s (to 20), 5s, or 10s (to 100).

For younger kids, you could just have them match the blank circles (flip the number GOLD coins over) and place them onto the Pot-O-Gold circles. This will work on some fine motor skills in addition to helping them match the shapes.

We will probably try this again tomorrow once we get out to the store and get some real coins to try this again... like No Time for Flashcard's Lucky Gold Hunt.

Language Development:

In this activity we worked on counting aloud and saying the numbers 1-10. We also talked about locations and I worked on the concepts of over, around, under, beneath, next to, behind, close to, near, on top, etc. while we were doing our hunt. If my son couldn't find the GOLD I would give him a hint. For example, "it is next to the fireplace" or "it is near your drums." These hints helped worked on his understanding of the concepts above. If he didn't understand what I said, then I would go and show him and repeat my hint while I found the GOLD for him.