a venn diagram for a 3-year-old

I've seen several of my friends post craft projects that they've done with their kids from this blog site.  I finally decided to check it out, and I love it!  I like how she has different age ranges at the top to make it easier to find an age-appropriate activity for your child.

Callan's been skipping his afternoon naps more and more lately (boo!), so I decided it was time to check out the I Can Teach My Child! blog to find an afternoon activity for us to do.  I was pleasantly surprised when one of my first clicks on her blog took me to this activity.  The only supplies you needed in order to complete the project was a piece of paper (or dry erase board, like she used) and a marker.  Setting up for an activity doesn't get much easier than that! 

I decided to kick it up a notch and get some glue and scissors, too, because I wanted Callan to be more involved in the activity instead of having me do all the drawing and writing.  Here's what we did...

I made a Venn Diagram (two overlapping circles) and wrote Kinsley's name under one circle and Callan's name under the other circle.  Then Callan used his scissors to cut out little pieces of yellow paper, while I wrote all the letters of each name on them.  We called the parts of the Venn Diagram "Kinsley's circle", "Callan's circle", and the one in the middle "the sharing circle".  If the particular letter was found in both names, then the letter got glued onto the sharing circle.  If it was only found in that person's name, then we glued it onto "their" circle.  The activity went something like this:

Me: What's the first letter in Kinsley's name?

C: It's a K.

Me: Does your name have a "K" in it?

C: No.

Me: Ok.  So should we glue the "K" onto Kinsley's part of the circle or in the sharing circle?  

C: Kinsley's circle. (Then he glued the K onto the circle.)

Me: What letter comes next in Kinsley's name?   etc.....

I had just planned on doing one Venn Diagram with him, but after we got done he wanted to do another.  About an hour later we had done four!  I suggested that we do Mommy and Daddy next.  Then Nana and Grandpa.  And of course you can guess what he wanted to do as his last one...

 

 

It was a great activity that spurred on a lot of good conversation between the two of us.  Callan would start making connections and say things like, "Mommy, your name starts with the same letter as moose!"  We also talked about how Nana didn't have any letters in her circle because she shared them all with Grandpa's name.  

The best part about it was that Callan didn't even know he was  doing an educational activity, or "doing school" as we call it.  He just thought it was a fun thing to do because after we were done he said, "Are we going to do school now?"