Do your kids like to play with their food? I know there are times when we might discourage this and focus on promoting polite table manners, but there are other times when fun food can be just what you need to get reluctant writers, drawers, counters and storytellers bursting with enthusiasm.
We’ve been playing around with Jacob’s Oddities this week – cute little snacks that come in all sorts of fun shapes that are just right for making art you can eat!
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
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.
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?
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:
Pre-school maths isn’t just about counting – why not try one of these pattern ideas today?
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 Bed by 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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