I know you have heard of the pop fidget toys. It is all the rage with elementary students. Of course, as teachers, we can make anything a learning tool, and that is exactly what we are doing. We are incorporating learning with pop fidget toys in our lessons. You can use these as a fun manipulative for math, phonics and phonemic awareness. These are perfect for whole group, small group, centers, morning work, literacy or math tubs and so much more. The best part of all is that it also helps build fine motor skills as they push with their fingers to pop! I am going to share some fun activities that you can use in your preschool or kindergarten classroom.

A few ways to have fun learning with popping fidget toys:

• Counting Practice – Give students a number card, have them roll a dice or two, or simply call out a number and have them pop it for one to one correspondence.
• Counting Games – Have students take turns rolling a dice (or pull a number card). They can pop that many (I have mine count out loud). The student to pop all of it first is the winner.
• Addition Manipulative – Students will add two numbers. They will pop in the first number, then pop in the second. They will count all of them as they add them together.
• Subtracting Activity – Students will pop in the first number. Then, they will reverse the popping for the number they are taking away.
• Phoneme Segmentation- Students will pop one popper for each sound.
• Syllable Practice – Students will pop once for every syllable they hear.
• Letter and Number Formation – If the bubble popper is large enough, the student can create the number or letter by popping in the formation.

There are so many fun and interactive things you can do!

I have created some task cards with recording pages to use with or without the card set. Click here to check them out!