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I’m looking for fun ways to teach shapes – got any ideas for me?

We started our mission by eating a lunch of circles, easy to make a whole meal of circles once you start looking!

Happily shared with ABCand123
and Weare ThatFamily

You can make maths much more fun if you mix in some songs and imaginary play. Today we’ve been counting backwards and singing ‘Ten in the Bed’.

First we took a cardboard box and used some fabric scraps to make a bedsheet, pillows and blanket.

Then we made 10 little people and numbered them 1 to 10. With a bit of a squash and a squeeze they all fitted in.

Then it was time for some singing – and lots of giggling as Little rolled her people out of bed. We’ve done an alternative version of this using our sofa as a bed and Big’s favourite teddies to make up the numbers. It’s very funny when you’re 3 to make your teds whizz out of bed!

A great book choice to go with this is Ten in the Bedby Penny Dale, which has beautiful illustrations.

And just in case you don’t know the song, there’s a cute pre-school class over on You Tube waiting to sing it to you.

One potato, two potato, three potato, four

Five potato, six potato, seven potato more

It’s easy to include some maths in your garden if you’ve been growing your own fruit and vegetables.

You could…

Count how many potatoes you have. Draw up a chart to record the harvest from your garden and add up the grand total of what you’ve grown.

Rank your produce by size from biggest to smallest.

Measure your spuds – ours went from 1cm up to 10cm.

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Why not? ….  add some bubbles to your water play today and set up a carwash in the garden?

Include some washing up sponges and scrubbers and get your trikes sparkly and clean.

And how about giving the children a purse with some coins so they can count out and pay for their carwash?

More fun doing maths this way than with a worksheet!

Come and join our Sunflower Club for lots more sunflower fun.

The music on the slideshow is from the Album Frogs Legs by Various Artists Kazoomzoom

Have some fun with bean bags!

We have four colours of bean bags so we chose four coloured chalks to match.  We drew four different shapes and numbered them 1 to 4. Then it was time to play.

Have a go at colour matching – can you throw the blue bean bag into the blue shape?

Have a go with numbers - can you throw a bean bag onto the number 1? onto the number 2?

Have a go with shapes - can you throw all the bean bags into the circle?

With older children you can let them throw at the targets and add up the scores as you go along.

Have some fun with your maths!

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Works For Me Wednesday and…

Sunflower Club: We have lift off!

I can’t tell you how excited we were to discover our baby seedlings have popped their heads above the soil. Big and Little were dancing!  The plantlets are tiny at the moment but we have high hopes, and to monitor their progress we have made a Sunflower Height Chart.

We started by drawing a leaf for each member of the family, colouring them in and writing our names on them.

Then, using a roll of paper stuck to the side of the fridge, we drew a tall, tall sunflower stalk. We all stood against it to measure how tall we are, and used our leaf to mark our height. This gave us lots of chat about big, small, medium and so on. And about how children grow taller but grown-ups do not.

And then it was the sunflowers’ turn. Big measured them with a ruler and discovered they were 4cm tall already.

Over on the height chart we measured 4 cm up the stalk and coloured it in green. We’ll keep measuring and ‘growing’ our height chart stalk as the plants grow. Maybe the girls will grow over the Summer too. The children are especially excited about the sunflowers growing above their heads.  And as Daddy is 6’4” the little seedings have a lot to beat.

This is part of our Sunflower Club project - and it’s never to late to join. There’s still plenty of time to get planting. And if you do and you blog about it, please link up with the MckLinky so we can all see how you’re getting on. Pop over for a look now to see themadhouse’s great idea for using eggshell planters.

Here’s  a quick idea you could try to explore shapes with your child.

Take a kitchen washing-up sponge and cut it into different shapes using some scissors. We made rectangles, squares and triangles. Talk with your child about the shapes: How many sides do they have? What are they called? Can they see anything in the room the same shape? What pictures could you make with the shapes?

Then place some paint onto a shallow dish and show your child how you can dip a sponge shapes into the paint and then press it on to a piece of paper to make a print. Have fun experimenting to see what you can create… a house, a train, a spaceship?

You might also like these shape ideas.

Happily shared with Today’s Creative Blog

‘I’ll do it all by myself’ is being said many times a day by Little at the moment. She’s also really enjoying counting, so we combined her two passions, with a dash of chocolate chips, in this fun counting game.

We started off by writing numbers on small pieces of paper. No chance of me writing any though as ‘I’ll do it all by myself’ said Little. She wrote numbers from 1 – 5 and also a couple of zeros (which she regretted later!) It’s great to see how she’s absorbed these numbers from ideas such as our number line so she can now write them by herself.

Then we put one piece of paper in each hole of a muffin tin and I gave her a pot of raisins and some chocolate chips.

Then I asked her if she’d like to play a counting game. ‘You tell me what to do mummy and then I’ll do it by myself’. I asked her to count out the right number of raisins/choc chips to match the number in each muffin hole. (So she has to recognise the written number and match the right number of real objects to the written digit).

And the prize at the end of the game for getting all the counting right – eating the raisins and chocolate chips of course. Which she did all by herself too!

If you’d like to see some more maths ideas you can find them here.

Happily shared with WeAreTHATFamily.

***FEATURING MY FIRST VLOG POST***

scroll down to take a look

If you’re trying to nurture a new skill in a child I think you should always take your cue from them. Think about what they love and enjoy and use this as the medium to teach the lesson. Little currently adores ducks. She got a little yellow duck in a party loot bag which is accompanying her everywhere – and she quite likes ‘being’ a duck herself. She’s also very interested in numbers – a skill which I’m keen for her to practise. Today she wanted to do some painting so, to encourage those numbers, we decided to make a duck number line.

I’ve blogged about number lines before and I think they’re a really useful way to incorporate written numbers into your child’s environment. Ours is strung along the kitchen window – a prominent position so Little is often looking at it. We refer to it most days, for example when we’re counting out spoons to set the table, so we’re gently reinforcing the number progression and linking the physical number of spoons with the written number symbols on the line. Of course, once things have been on display for a while they become a little stale and you walk past without noticing so I like to change the pictures on the number line to keep it interesting for Little. We’ve previously done ladybirds, autumn leaves and Christmas trees.

To make a duck number line: I cut out some duck shapes from pieces of card and Little set about paining them. Let you child be creative here and paint them any colour they like. Little was quite clear that she wanted pink and yellow ducks – so who am I to argue! Holding the paintbrush is good motor skill practice and the mark-making aspect paves the way for later writing. You can see from the vlog that she can’t resist swirling all her paints together – more experimenting.

Once the ducks were dry Little added eyes and numbers using a felt pen. She was determined to write the numbers herself so I encouraged her to have a try – are you impressed with how well she did them? As one reason for making the number line is to have her see the (correct) written form of the numbers I added a small (correct) version of each numeral too – careful not to make Little think that her version was in anyway not good enough.

Children learn in a multi-sensory way and adding other experiences to a lesson re-inforces what you’re teaching – so why not add in some song while you’re painting and counting. Hope you like her rendition of Five Little Ducks Went Swimming One Day!

We’re going to extend the play with ducks by adding them to the bathwater tonight – so Little can enjoy some small-world role play. And tomorrow we’re off to feed the ducks at the local pond – so she can learn about the real world and see some ducks in action.

And just in case you don’t know all the words and would like to sing with your child, the lyrics are here. If you’re not painting, you should hold up the corresponding number of fingers, and swim them off like the little ducks:

5 little ducks went swimming one day,

over the pond and far away,

when mummy duck said ‘quack, quack, quack, quack’

only 4 little ducks came back.

(and so on, until – in a sad voice- …

no little ducks went swimming one day,

over the pond and far away,

when mummy duck said ‘quack, quack, quack, quack’

ALL THE 5 LITTLE DUCKS CAME BACK!

This post is part of the 2010 API Principles of Parenting blog carnival, a series of monthly parenting blog carnivals, hosted by API Speaks. Learn more about attachment parenting by visiting the API website.