Roly-Poly Bird Number Tuff Spot

With Roald Dahl Day approaching we thought it apt to create a Tuff Spot centered around one of his characters. We made a Roly-Poly Bird Number Tuff Spot.

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The Roly-Poly Bird features in two of Roald Dahl’s classics – The Enormous Crocodile and The Twits. The Roly-Poly Bird is described as large, with fantastically coloured tail feathers, his favourite foods are berries and he speaks at least two languages – Zulu and English.

Twinkl have a wonderful set of numbered Roly-Poly Birds so I didn’t have to attempt to draw the character myself. I simply printed the numbers out (two to a page), cut around the birds and placed the numbers 1-10 in our blue Tuff Spot. I then poured a 1.7KG bag of wild bird seed into the Tuff Spot to cover each bird. Finally I placed four coloured pots inside the Tuff Spot and added a variety of fine motor tools – Helping Hands Tool Set, a Jumbo Tweezer and our favourite scoopers.

It felt strange playing with the Tuff Spot in the living room after so many months of outside play but with torrential rain outside we brought it inside. Adam couldn’t wait to start finding the hidden Roly-Poly Birds. He immediately chose one of the scoopers and started to pour the bird seed into a coloured pot. It didn’t take him long to find the first Roly-Poly Bird. As Adam is confident with recognising numbers up to 10 I wanted to focus on ordering numbers. I placed 10 balls of white Tack around the rim of the Tuff Spot and demonstrated how we could place the Roly-Poly Birds in the correct order.

It didn’t take long before Adam could order the numbers independently and tell me what numbers were missing.

Once Adam had found all 10 Roly-Poly Birds and attached them in the correct order around the edge of the Tuff Spot I hid numbers 11-20 underneath the bird seed. I also added a further 10 balls of white Tack for the additional numbers. Adam continued to love searching for the extra birds and with a little support he was able to order the numbers to 20.

As soon as the Roly-Poly Birds were in place Adam wanted to take them down and start the activity again. I can tell our Roly-Poly Bird Number Tuff Spot will be in our living room for some time.

Want to view more Number inspired Tuff Spot activities? Click on the picture below to take you to our Tuff Spot Tuesday challenge:

Equipment:

* Tuff Spot

* A set of numbered Roly Poly Birds from Twinkl. We used numbers 1-20.

* Wild bird seed

* A variety of fine motor tools. We used Helping Hands Tool Set, Jumbo Tweezer and scoopers

* White Tack

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