Turbo Top – Fun with Vitrigraph…Fast!!

Here’s the first of many products that need to be talked about from my Las Vegas adventure. It’s the Turbo Top and the Turbo Lift by Innovative Glass Solutions. Have you tried vitrigraph? You pull hot glass from the bottom of a suspended kiln to make swirly shapes and canes and twists that are amazing additions to fufsed pieces but also make great jewelry items on their own. Larr Cunningham of Innovative Glass Solutions has created both the Turbo Top and the Turbo Lift to help make the vitrigraph experience that much better.

The Turbo Lift allows you to mount your kiln and be able to adjust the height of it to 5 vertical positions. So cool. It allows a vertical range of 28″ in 5 pre-set increments. And it comes preassembled so you can easily attach it to your kiln. The Turbo Top heats your kiln in half the time. This makes getting to your vitrigraph good times that much faster. And it fits most table top kilns. So if you’re ready to try it out, play with vitrigraph, you need these fabulous tools. And as a bit of a disclaimer, I’ve worked with Larr and Leigh Adams teaching Extreme Vitrigraph, which adds torchwork to the party, and these are essential add ons to your vitrigraph experience! Pull some hot glass!! You can currently find these at Pacific Art Glass…

Learning numbers actually involves a few different skills, from recognizing the shape of the number and knowing the word that goes with it to understanding one to one correspondence for counting and what order the numbers go in.

A lot of this is learned best through play and activities that get kids counting and tracing and otherwise interacting with numbers. These activities can help.

I specifically mentioned tracing above because of these number formation rhymes cards from Teaching Mama, which can be used in lots of ways to practice making the shapes of the numbers, including tracing, lining up items on the number shapes (and counting them!), using playdough to shape the numbers and so on. Each number has a little rhyme to help you remember how to make it, which is cute.

And speaking of playdough, you can find lots of playdough number mats with different themes for kids to use as they learn about numbers. Preschool Play and Learn, for example, has these cute apple themed ones that also teach one to one correspondence as you learn the numbers and count to 10.

Or use these tree-themed ones from Live Over Cs to form the numbers, count out items on a ten frame and place the correct number of items in the tree to match the number (do this with playdough, little buttons or whatever manipulatives you have on hand). Your little builders will also love these Duplo number mats from Life Over Cs, which allow you to shape the number out of blocks and count out the number of blocks that corresponds to each number.

I also love these mats from The Savvy Sparrow that include the number and the word you can trace with playdough or marker, showing how to count the number on your fingers, a tens frame and a number line.

Finger plays and counting songs are lots of fun for little ones, too, and Childhood 101 has a great collection of songs and rhymes having to do with numbers (as well as printable song cards you can use with them.

This cardboard roll number chain form Hands On As We Grow would be a fun addition to singing number songs or to use in other play and counting games. And we all love something easy to make with stuff we already have.

Older kids who already know the order of numbers can also use these connect the dot number printables from Fun Learning for Kids. Or use the shapes for playdough mats or to practice tracing even for kids who don’t know all the numbers in order yet.

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