Celebrate National Twins Day

August 4, 2023 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

Did you know that August 5 is celebrated as National Twins Day? More generally, the first weekend of the month of August is Twins Days, which is a festival held in Twinsburg, Ohio, each year to celebrate twins of all types. The event has taken place since 1976 and routinely attracts up to 2,000 pairs of twins. (Dressing alike is, apparently heavily encouraged but not required.)

If you want to celebrate twins at home or at school, check out some books about twins! This collection was gathered by Twin Mom and More, and includes a nice collection of picture books for twins and about twins. These would be great to give at a baby shower for a twin mom, if you happen to know one of those.

Maybe you’ll want to learn some fun facts about twins as well. About 3 percent of births are twins. Identical twins develop from a single egg and share all of the same DNA, while fraternal twins develop from two separate eggs, so they do not share all their DNA. Twins are more likely to be born premature, and they’re also more likely to be left handed (22 percent of twins compared to 10 percent of single babies are left handed).

I couldn’t find a lot in the way of activities for Twin Day, but of course lots of matching games would be appropriate. Childhood 101 and Activity Mom both have good collections of printable matching games if you don’t already have a collection of your own.

You could also practice doubling numbers or dividing things in half. Stories by Storie has some great ideas for games, songs and other activities for learning about doubling numbers that would be fun for your very own twin day.

Add in a little throwback TV and introduce your kids to “Rugrats” while you eat your Twin Pops and your twins day will be complete!

[Image by 1035352 from Pixabay]

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Gross Motor Math Ideas

With little kids especially, linking learning to physical activity really does help them learn. Movement can help kids focus, and it just keeps them from sitting still all day, which isn’t good for anyone.

The good news is lots of different learning activities can be adopted to get kids moving while they learn, so let’s look at some math and number activities that use gross motor skills.

Probably the most obvious thing would be hopscotch, which helps kids count while they hop. You can also mix up the numbers, do skip counting with the numbers, give kids a simple math problem and have them hop to the correct answer, and on and on.

This number hop game from Gift of Curiosity is a more chaotic version, with number flash cards on the floor that kids can hop, skip or jump to as you call them out (this one is more for individual number identification than counting). It’s a great indoor option if it’s too hot, cold or rainy out to do traditional hopscotch, too.

This painter’s tape number line idea from Days with Grey doesn’t involve quite as much movement, but kids can move around while they place things on the number line and work on learning about one to one correspondence. In the blog post they use shoes, but you can count anything you’ve got handy. (Be warned when I visited this website had an ad that continually took up the whole page, but you can get the idea pretty quickly.)

One of the important tasks of learning numbers is learning a parent’s phone number just in case it’s ever needed, or how to dial 911 in case on an emergency. Teaching Mama has a great way to practice telephone numbers and get some movement in with a giant telephone keypad made out of paper plates. You can also use this for counting practice, but it’s a great idea for learning phone numbers, too.

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