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Mobi Kids and Sudoku!

Hi everyone! We are mixing two of our favourite games in this post… Mobi Kids and Sudoku! You can go ahead and print off the grids we’ve made!!

One thing that we love doing as a family is playing games. We happened upon a Sudoku for kids book at our Nana and Papa’s house last weekend and our 6 year old took to it immediately. We were honestly kind of surprised as sitting still does not happen too much with this little…but sit he did!

One tricky things that was pointed out was how the little grids were. Our son found it difficult to make his numbers so small. If you follow us on Instagram…you will see that our numbers are VERY BIG right now! To make Sudoku work for us…we simply took the grid and drew it on a bigger piece of paper – perfect! This worked in terms of fitting our numbers into boxes and also gave us some room to write down the possible numbers at the top of the boxes. Win, win, win!!!

 Awesome things about play Sudoku with Mobi tiles….

• You can move tiles around at will and try variations of play very easily.
• There is a tactile approach added to the game.
• The game becomes more colourful
• You can play the same grid over and over because once you take the tiles off, the grid is clean!
• Playing with numbers will get your littles comfortable with numbers. The fact they can try and try again without have to commit to a move proved to be really positive for our family. “What if we tried this?” …. Hmmmm “What if we put this tile here? Would that work?”
• The game becomes cooperative for multiple players. We were able to play as family. With a pencil, that is a little tricky, but with Mobi tiles, Sudoku became a working puzzle.

We’d love to hear about other ways you play with Mobi tiles! The possibilities are endless! We've included some here for you to play with!!

How do you play with Mobi?!?!?!

Hello everyone! There are so many things we love to do with our kids and being outside is one of them. One activity we’ve been doing is going on scavenger hunts! One of our favourite things to find or pick up = rocks!

Why rocks? I have no idea. It started about a month ago and we haven’t looked back. Every ravine walk we go on yields us a ton of prolonged fun. The kids like to pick different rocks. Sometimes we pick big, heavy rock and sometimes, the little (baby) rocks are the choice of the day.

As you know…. at Mobi we LOVE toys and activities that disguise learning and make it fun, right?! Open-ended, developmental play is the name of the game! Rocks are no different. There is no wrong way to play with them. Well, I take that back. Throwing rocks at someone is not a good idea and as you can imagine with two littles, we’ve had to have that conversation. Throwing at your sibling aside (!!), there is no wrong way to play with rocks! One of our favourite things to do with the rocks has been to paint them!

Painting rocks!

This is a great calm down activity after a day out. The kids love it and love having something beautiful to physically show after all their effort of “hunting for rocks!” seems to really excite them!

There are so many benefits that come from painting and I’ll hit on a few below:

The Brain:

Creative activities like painting exercise a different part of the brain than reading or math. The right side of the brain is often called our creative half. It is responsible for visual skills and understanding what we see with our eyes. Painting and creative play help exercise your child’s right brain.

Motor Control:

Squeezing the paint tubes into little containers, holding the fine paint brush and the act of painting ….we are working both fine and gross motor skills here. The bigger the canvas (if conventional and using paper ;) ) the more gross motor work at play.

Sensory Experience:

Painting on any surface is a beautiful sensory experience. With rocks, this is slightly heightened because there are so many edges, curves and textures. 

Cause and Effect:

We are big advocates of cause and effect play at Möbi. It is huge for development and we have tried to incorporate this into all our infant/toddler products. With painting …. kids are also working on this! For example, when a child starts out with yellow paint but mixes blue in ….. they will be able to see that that one action creates blue!

Verbal Language Skills:

As a parent you can ask open-ended questions like “what are you painting?” or “would you tell me about your painting”? As you can imagine, in our household we can some crazy answers! Rocks have become ninjas, dragons and rainbows.  Asking open-ended questions, just like open-ended play, allows your child to stretch and grow his/her thinking and verbal skills. 

Confidence:

Whether your child’s rainbow comes out looking like a rainbow or a brown clump …. They will take pride in their painting and will see in your eyes that you do too.

We would never have thought that collecting rocks would be as fun for our family as it has turned out to be. We’ve been asked if we will hang our kids’ rocks on the fridge with their other artwork! Instead we are forming a rock garden!!

What are you guys doing to keep creative? We’d love to hear from you!

Hello and happy Tuesday, March 24^th 2020! Like most of you …. we are still in isolation, and still coming up with creative ways to entertain our kiddos at home. Keeping everyone safe and healthy is our priority as parents! Keeping sane as parents…that’s also our priority ;)

So…what’s happening in our house??? We maybe, just maybe have some fun, educational games that we’ve created hiding in our storage room. Today we brought up Mobi Kids and started playing!

Activity Booklet!

Our son Noah is 6 and loves numbers. He always has. So getting him to playing with tactile number tiles is pretty easy for us! The picture below is actually from when he was 3! Mobi Kids comes with an Activity Booklet that takes a step-by-step progression towards making equations. So even when you have young little people in your household, they can start playing and getting comfortable with numbers! Pretty awesome right?

We’ve attached the link here so even if you don’t have Mobi Kids (or have Original Mobi and want the resource!) you can access it!

Activity Booklet

Original Game Play!

Once your kids are ready to make equations on their own…you can start playing Mobi Kids!

Mobi Kids is a gentle approach to numbers/math. Each player gets their own set of tiles and the operation tiles are communal. Players try to connect all their number tiles (using operation tiles) before the other player!

Other ways to play with Mobi Kids!

• Kate’s Way! Our daughter Kate is 2 and a half. When she isn’t hiding number tiles on us….and we are able to get her to sit still for a second, we play “Kate’s Way!”.

I say: Kate can you find all the 2s?

Kate collects the 2.

I say: Kate can you find all the 8s?

Kate collects all the 8s.

….. you get the idea. Such a simple game but for number recognition, tactile play and fun…..this is amazing when you are 2!!!!!!

• What If??? Noah always likes to shake things up, so we created “What If?”

I say: Noah, what if I had 5 pet monsters and 2 went to the park? How many monsters would I have left??

Noah finds the number 3 tile.

 Noah's Monster! 

I say: Noah, you have 3 cookies and Kate has 5 cookies. How many total cookies are there?

Noah finds the number 8 tile.

Again….you get the idea. Super simple but for the kids, mental math is at play and they get to see you as their parent get creative!

Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy! Until next time!