Craft Stick Puzzles

I've been working with Ronan on counting to 20 (He only makes it to 13 most of the time), and on letter sounds. Today I decided to look on Pinterest for hands-on ideas. Amazingly, I found NOTHING, but somehow looking through other preschool ideas gave me an idea. Ronan loves puzzles, so I made a puzzle to help him with his numbers. I printed out some Cars coloring pages and colored them. Then I painted the back of the pictures with glue and stuck popsicle sticks to them. I cut the popsicle sticks apart with an exacto knife and labelled them with numbers 1 through 20. Then, I wrapped them with packing tape to make them more durable. Now, he can practice placing the numbers in order to form a picture, and when I do it with him, we can also say the numbers aloud. He can't complete the puzzle by himself yet, but I do think he'll get it soon.

If you decide to do this, I used the large popsicle sticks, and no, twenty sticks do not fit on one page. I used two coloring pages, used "Paint" to connect the ground between them, and then split it onto two pages (Well, actually the top and bottom of one page). The seam is on stick #11, but its not overly obvious.

It was easier than I expected and turned out exactly as I planned, so I decided to make a few more puzzles. I will probably make a few other number puzzles later, but today I decided to start on some basic spelling puzzles. They are much easier than the number puzzle, but I wanted it that way. I figure he will probably need to learn his numbers in order to be able to complete the picture, but on the word puzzles he will have to be able to complete the picture in order to reveal the word. These are the word puzzles I made. I plan on doing "cat", "dog", etc later, but for now I just used family pictures.