Math Archives - Page 42 of 46

Rabbit craft

26/01/2011 by Cathy James 7 Comments

Are you celebrating the Chinese new year next week? I like to observe celebrations from around the world with the children as I think it open their eyes to diverse cultures, showing them how people around the world are different but how the basis of many traditions are very similar too. We like to make Chinese style lanterns (which are perfect for practising scissors skills) and eating a Chinese meal. This year, which begins on 3rd February 2011, will be the year of the rabbit so here’s an idea for a craft you could try:

Potato Printing a Rabbit

We used potatoes and carrots to print with to make our rabbit. (Seems appropriate to use carrots, don’t you think?) Carrot printing is great for younger children as the carrots are just right for holding in little hands. Potatoes are a little more cumbersome to hold but you can make easier for the children to grasp if you cut out a handle into the top – as shown in the picture.

This rabbit design provides the opportunity to mix in some maths, as we thought about what shapes we could use to make our pictures. We decided to make a picture using just two shapes: circles and triangles.

I used a knife to cut out a triangle from the carrots, the potatoes were simply sliced in half.

We also talked about size as we used a big shape to make the body, ears and carrots and a small shape for the head, nose and carrot leaves.

We enjoyed having a specific project – working out how to form our rabbits and follow our instructions to create the pictures – but it was great to add in time at for some free style printing too, to see what other designs we could come up with using the circles and triangles.

More Chinese New Year activities

Raise a global child! Exploring festivals from different countries and cultures is a wonderful way to learn about the world. You can see our archive of Chinese New Year activities here.

Eat some fractions

19/01/2011 by Cathy James 9 Comments

$fraction activities$

Teaching children fractions is easy in the kitchen as meal times are when we apply fractions to our everyday lives. Whether we realise it or not every time we make sandwiches, cut up a cake or share out slices of pizza we’re using fractions. Here are some ideas you can use with children to introduce fractions in a fun and practical way, so that when they come to ‘learn’ fractions at school they’ll already be familiar and confident with the underlying principles.

How to Throw a Fractions Tea Party

Make some sandwiches and cut off the crusts to make a clear square shape from your slices of bread. Help your child to slice up the sandwiches and talk about the shapes and fractions you make as you slice. Cut the sandwich in half to make two rectangles. Cut it into quarters and count the four smaller squares you have. Cut these diagonally into eigths and count the eight triangles you have made.

Make a drink of juice and talk about how many parts of water and juice you need to mix together. Maybe you want to make half water and half fruit juice – measure out two equal halves and pour them together to make a whole drink. Maybe you need to use tenths and mix one tenth cordial with nine tenths juice. If you have a clear plastic bottle you can make lines on the outside with a permanent marker to divide the bottle up into tenths, to make the fractions clearer.

Put your child in charge of splitting some fruit into fractions. If you have five people in your family your child is going to have to give everyone a fifth of a share from a bag of grapes. Let them line up five little bowls and put one grape (or blueberry or whatever) in each bowl, repeating until all the grapes are shared out, with a fifth in each bowl.

Have some cake for pudding, cut into slices. How many slices do you have? How much is left after everyone has had a slice of cake – half? Three quarters? A third?

Including talk about maths in your everyday play and activities gives your child lots of opportunity to play about with concepts, so that when they come to study them in a more academic way they already have the beginning of an understanding of the principles, and they will feel comfortable and confident in approaching maths.

Christmas beetle drive

09/12/2010 by Cathy James 6 Comments

Do you know how to play beetle? It’s a simple children’s game using a dice, great for practising turn taking, following instructions and fair play, and for number recognition too. Here’s a Christmas version: perfect for cold snowy days when you’re stuck inside or for those days between Christmas and New Year when you need a quick idea to have some fun.

You need just one dice, and a piece of paper and a pencil for each player.

How to play beetle The object of the game is to take turns rolling the dice and get the numbers you need to complete a picture of Father Christmas. Each number of the dice corresponds to a different part of Father Christmas’s face:

1 means you can draw his face

2 means you can draw his hat

3 means you can draw his eyes

4 means you can draw his beard

5 means you can draw his nose

6 means you can draw his mouth

However you have to start off with his face, so each player has to wait until they roll a 1 before they can start drawing their picture.

If you roll a number you’ve already used in your picture, you have to miss a go.

If you’re playing with pre-schoolers you can make it bit easier by pre-drawing and cutting out the pieces of the face they will need. Older children can simply draw their own Father Christmas using their paper and pencil.

The winner is the first person to complete Santa. I’m sure you can think of a good prize!

A variation to make it harder

You can make things a little harder, and play a longer game, if you use a reindeer as your picture.

1 means you can draw a body

2 means you can draw a head

3 means you can draw an antler (so you need to throw 3 twice to get both antlers)

4 means you can draw a leg (se you need to throw 4 four times to get all the legs)

5 means you can draw a tail

6 means you can draw a red nose

You have to have a body to start and you need a head before you can draw antlers or a nose.

Have you got any other Christmas versions of easy games? Please feel free to add a link in the comments.

happily shared with We Play

Salad spinner painting

05/12/2010 by Cathy James 4 Comments

This craft was meant to be. We’ve wanted to have a go at spinning art for a while, so last week I went out to try and buy a salad spinner. As we were intending to get it covered in paint I didn’t want to spend a fortune on one but in any case fate intervened. As I walked passed a charity shop, guess what I spied on the shelf inside? One salad spinner! Sold.

Salad Spinner Painting.

You will need: a salad spinner, paper plates or circles of paper/card to fit in the spinner, runny paint, glitter is optional

You can use one big circle of card which fills the whole of the base of the spinner, or you can put several smaller circles of card in the base and put paint on each one. These smaller ones are good if you’re making gift tags.

1. Check if your salad spinner has drainage holes in the botton and if it does, sit it on a plate or tray to catch any paint.

2. Place your paper plate or circle of paper / card in the bottom of the salad spinner basket. It’s a good idea to hold it in place with a piece of Bluetac.

3. Put some blobs of the runny paint on the plate / paper / card.

4. Replace the lid of the spinner and get spinning.

5. Take off the lid to check your design. Do you want to spin again? Add some different colours? Sprinkle some glitter on while the paint is still wet?

We’re going to use our designs to make Christmas decorations and gift tags, by punching a hole and adding some ribbon.

This spinning technique is also great for trying out colour mixing – add a blob of blue and yellow and spin to make shades of green.

You could make a fantastic mobile from your paper plates, or turn them into planets to make a space scene.

Have you tried salad spinner painting? How did you use your designs?

happily shared with Tot Tuesday and ABC and 123

Shape garland

25/11/2010 by Cathy James 12 Comments

Easy shape art activity for preschool and toddlers

Did you see the marble painting we did yesterday? It was great roly-poly fun and we decided that instead of just adding to our picture gallery we would use the designs to make a shape garland.

We had lots of chat about which shapes we would use and decided to stick with circles, squares and triangles, as the children would find them fairly easy to cut out themselves.

We went on a shape hunt to find objects the right shape and size to draw round and then we cut them out.

We used our fingers to trace round the outside of the shapes and count how many sides they had.

We did some shape sorting, making piles of circles, triangles and squares.

We talked about size and lined each shape up from biggest to smallest.

Then we used sticky tape to fasten our shapes onto thread and hung up our garland to decorate our room. The mobile looks beautiful as it twirls around.

shape art for toddlers

That’s a lot of fun learning from one simple activity. How do you teach shapes to your children?

Maths games: repeating patterns

11/11/2010 by Cathy James 2 Comments

What? Repeating patterns are everywhere: in fabric designs, buildings in your neighbourhood, in the songs that you sing. Any sequence of colours, shapes, actions that repeact twice or more become a repeating pattern.

Why? So what have repeating patterns got to do with your children’s play? Well, by looking out for patterns and including them in your play you’re giving your child the opportunity to develop important mathematical thinking. Many maths concepts are based on patterns, such as addition, times tables and geometry.

How? Children often make their own patterns as they play with bottle tops or building blocks but here are some ideas you can use to let your child explore repeating patterns:

Start off a pattern and see if they can follow. You can use anything: blocks, bottle tops, stickers, fridge magnets.
If your children love patterns you can they might enjoy these games just for the satisfaction of making a pattern. You can also sneak them into other creative play too: while we were making some furniture for our dolls house we used some coloured star stickers to decorate the rug we made for the dolls’ sitting room – with a repeating pattern design of course.
You don’t have to just use colour to form the pattern – try different shapes, number groups or sizes.
Try clapping patterns, going slow, slow, fast, fast, fast – and seeing if you can copy each others rythmn.
Make yourself some mathematical jewellry, by threading a repeating pattern of beads or coloured pasta tubes onto a string.
Do a full body workout, making repeating patterns of jumping, skipping, clapping and hopping.
Go on a pattern hunt when you’re out and about – you might be surprised at just how many repeating patterns are out there and how good your child is at spotting them.

Pre-school maths isn’t just about counting – why not try one of these pattern ideas today?

More Chinese New Year activities

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