Homemade manipulatives for phonics and math

[StormySar]

I am looking for ideas for homemade manipulatives using objects we might otherwise throw away or have lying around the house.

So far a neat idea I've heard of is to use those small spiral-bound index card sized notebooks to create a flip book of words/nonwords to sound out for emerging readers. The idea is to cut a section of the index cards into thirds and put some cvc words (one letter per section) on each section. You could also put beginning and ending blends together and th child could come up with any combination of letters to make words and nonwords. I will be doing that here, soon.

What do you do with paint chips from home improvement stores? Milk jug caps? Milk jug rings? Lids and containers? What else? I'm sure all of these things could be really useful in a homeschool environment. And I'm sure there are many more things I have just laying around waiting to b used, I just haven't had the creativity to come up with them.

[meetoo]

Bottle caps for counting and sorting.

Bingo games are super easy to make, number bingo addition/subtraction bingo, phonics bingo....You get the idea

use a deck of cards for

addition/subtraction war

addition/subtract memory

sorting

[gaudynight]

I've been using Lego with DD2 to talk about fractions.

On really special occasions (birthdays) (or when I'm having a bad day) I've been known to use squares of chocolate for maths.

[happy1nluv]

just saw on a blog (sorry, forget who's) that she wrote letters on bottle caps, floated them in a bowl of water and they fished with a spoon to make words (she had words prewritten on strips of paper)