Rubber Ducky Day!

Last Thursday (Jan 13, 2022) was National Rubber ducky day. I just love these national days because sometimes they are just so random but can lead to so much fun and learning! Of course you don't have to wait for National Rubber Ducky day to have some fun with rubber ducks. Any day can be ducky day!

We just kind of ran with the ducky theme and didn’t stick too heavily to the “rubber” part and that gave us a lot more freedom for our activities.

I borrowed a giant blowup duck from my neighbor and had it set out in the living room with some ducky themed books and that kicked off our day. The boys woke up and came down the stairs to see the giant float and we spent the morning alternating reading books on the couch and on the duck. They absolutely loved it!

I incorporated the rubber ducky theme in our math practice by doing a few different activities. I bought some small rubber ducks on Amazon and put them in a “pond” and numbered them with the digits one through nine. (I put tape on the bottom of the duck and wrote the numbers on the tape so that I could easily take the tape off and reuse the ducks for different purposes later on. Also- the little blow up pond came with a game I bought but when I was in the classroom I just used a hula hoop with blue butcher paper taped across it.)

Connor and I started by building numbers. He would pick two ducks from the pond and arrange the digits in whatever order he wanted. This led to a great discussion about how the two single digits can make two entirely different numbers- four and five can make either 45 or 54. Once he chose his number he would use his integer blocks to build it and then we would write it and practice saying it correctly.

You could do this same activity to make single digit numbers or numbers as big as you wanted! Cooper played also but he just practiced identifying the numbers on the duck he chose.

Another activity we did was we played “Who’s Greater?” We would count to three and then at the same time pull a duck from the pond and show each other the number on the bottom of our ducks. Whoever had the greatest number got a point. We played to a total of 10 points.

The “WHO’s Greater?” game can be adapted in so many ways for a variety of skills. For younger students just the digits one through nine is enough, but for older students you could make two digit, three digit, four digit numbers or even fractions or decimals on the bottom of the ducks. It just adds a little whimsy to a basic skill practice.

In the past I have used the duck pond activity for all kinds of skills. There are so many possibilities!

While I was looking around for Ducky activities I came across an article that described an event several years ago when a container fell off a ship and 28,000 rubber bath toys went overboard into the ocean . This lead me on a rabbit trail and eventually to check out the book Moby Duck from the library. Who knows if I’ll ever finish it, but it was so interesting I had to at least see what it was about!

Come to find out Eric Carle also saw the new story about the spilled ducks and used it to inspire his book 10 Little Ducks, so of course we had to read that one!

We even learned that the city of Chicago has a rubber ducky derby and they dump thousands of rubber ducks into the river and “race” them. It made for some great lunchtime conversation while we watched a video about it.

I found a fishing-type carnival game at Party City that was great for hand-eye coordination, patience and practice encouraging each other . The boys would have to fish for a duck and it actually turned out to be more challenging than I had anticipated, but they enjoyed it.

The rest of the day was spent just playing and having fun with the rubber ducks, building a fort with the giant inflatable duck, reading lots of duck-ish books, and ended with a rubber ducky bubble bath. It was such a fun day and I’m looking forward for how we can celebrate this day from year to year.

Until next time!