I love the look of the  “Year of the Monkey” pages on Activity Village, they have some really cute pages.

As soon as I saw their tumbling monkey pages, they screamed fun learning activities so I printed and cut them out even before I had really decided what to do with them.  I was initially thinking of using the blank monkeys as a number bond revision type exercise.  The idea was that my daughter would need to link all the monkey’s with sums that came to the same answer eg the monkey’s with 15+5 and the one with 22-2 would have to be linked as they both equalled 20.

But as often happens in my house my daughter saw the blank monkeys and made her own counting in 3’s monkey group.  I loved this as multiples of 3’s is still something that she is not totally comfortable with yet, so a great way for her to practice – she went all the way up to 30 before she ran out of space on her board.

I also downloaded the tumbling alphabet monkeys.  I initially thought it might be fun to have a long tumbling alphabet monkey but my son and I actually ended up using the monkeys to create words.  He started doing basic CVC words and hung them on a toy tree that we have.

And he also played around with the monkeys on a tray

He was having so much fun with his monkeys that without even realising he started trying to spell longer words (sorry not the best photos as I was trying not to disturb him)

And he continued trying to spell bigger and bigger words and then tried to make up a few of his own words.

All in all this ended up being one of the longest sessions that my son has sat working on words.  He was totally happy using the monkeys to try and spell words.

So sometimes downloading and cutting out resources before you actually know what you are going to use them for, can be a good thing !!

When I initially wrote this post all of the Tumbling monkey pages were FREE to download but Activity Village have since changed the structure of their website and these pages are now membership only pages

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