Here’s a kids art idea that you can try at home using recycled items that you’d otherwise throw away – we’re up-cycling and exploring texture to make touchy feeling patchwork pictures.
Eat some fractions
>>>> Download our ABCs and 123s guide here
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.
ABCs and 123s : fun learning activities for letters and math
All our favourite literacy and math activities, all in one place :: download our ABCs and 123s guide here.
Shape garland
>>>> Combine math and art with the ART of CIRCLES resources. Available here.
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.
That’s a lot of fun learning from one simple activity. How do you teach shapes to your children?
More creative math activities
If you’re looking for play-based exploration and discovery of math and science concepts, come and take a look at our Fizz, Pop, Bang! Playful Science and Math Activities.
And for more math-meets art resources, join my ART of CIRCLES workshop.
Maths games: repeating patterns
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?
Add some Fizz, Pop, Bang to your learning!
Take a look at our resources for creative science and math activities.
Bean bag games
>>>> Download our ABCs and 123s guide here
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.
ABCs and 123s : fun learning activities for letters and math
All our favourite literacy and math activities, all in one place :: download our ABCs and 123s guide here.