X Marks the Spot!

We've come to the letter X and I wasn't sure what we would do.  It seemed like Rayos X and Xilofono (X-Ray and Xylophone) were our only options... not too many words with X in English or Spanish!  I wanted to do something different.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I'd been thinking about doing map learning with Chiquita too and this thought surfaced - X Marks the Spot!  Chiquita loves Jake and the Neverland Pirates so she's familiar with the idea of using an X to mark treasure.

Like all my activities, this was kind of spur of the moment and off the cuff.  I drew up a quick map - not really a map but a series of landmarks to guide her - and taped the treasure (a miniature Jake and the Neverland Pirates coloring book pack) to the inside of a closet door with an X made of painter's tape.

Even with my terrible drawings Chiquita easily recognized the landmarks and only needed help to look on the inside of the door where the cat food is kept.  She enjoyed it so much that I drew up another map while she colored Jake and Izzy.

I tried making it a little trickier by having the map show her to go down stairs.  I also had to come up with a little more time-intensive "treasure" at the end in case she wanted a 3rd adventure, so the treasure this time was rainbow rice with "hidden" rings, beads and clothes pins to search for and hide.  We took turns hiding and digging up the treasure.  We even practiced colors in Spanish with the different rings!

Sure enough, she was soon ready for more treasure hunting.  In many ways this turned out to be the best one.  She wanted to search for treasure outside, so I made our last treasure sidewalk chalk!  The only part of the map that was tricky was going through the door, she couldn't tell it was a door!

Once, our last treasure was found it only took one demonstration and she spent the next 10 minutes making Xs all over our front walk!  I was really happy she was so enthusiatic about it and most of them really looked like Xs.