Jack the Builder - Building Block Activity

We have a number of the MathStart picture books by Stuart Murphy, and today we did an activity based on the book Jack the Builder.  This book teaches the American way of doing basic addition (start at the last number and then count by ones from that point), and since I'm trying to teach the kids the Japanese way (via the Rightstart Math curriculum, which teaches kids to view addition in terms of 5s and 10s), I focused more on the block-building than the math.

The book is about a boy who builds various things as he stacks up more and more blocks.  I think this is a terrific book, not necessarily for teaching addition, but for its message about using your imagination and the wonderful illustrations (we spent a lot of time examining each picture and pointing out different objects we found).

For this activity, I took out our wooden blocks and the girls tried to duplicate the creations the boy was making.  There are a number of skills involved:

1. Picking out the correct blocks by color, shape, and size
2. If the same color/shape/size block is not available, identifying what criteria to use to select an alternative
3. Using the correct number of blocks
4. Placing the blocks in the right orientation to replicate the formation in the picture.

Of course I let the girls discover these skills on their own as they worked on this task:

The towers crashed before they could build the spaceship at the end, so they used their problem solving skills to engineer their own spaceships:

We counted backwards from 10 and the girls screamed "Blast Off!"  Then, like in the book, the kids knocked the towers down and started again, building all sorts of creations from their imaginations.

Blocks in Socks - Early Math Game

L and E are 30 months old.

Yesterday we tried an activity called "Blocks in Socks".  It was loosely inspired by an idea in this book, with a lot of my own variations:

 

First I put one, two, or three 1-cm unit blocks in a (clean) sock, and invited the girls to reach in the tell me how many blocks were in the sock.  They had fun guessing and subsequently pulling the blocks out to count them, but didn't get this one right.  I love that this was challenging for them and we can redo this activity later.

Then I filled four socks with different amount of blocks (I wanted there to be big differences so it was something like 5, 10, 20, and 30 blocks).  Then I asked the girls if they could feel the outside of the sock to determine which one had the most blocks and which had the least.  Then we lifted them out to see which was heaviest and which was lightest.  They really understood this concept well.

To check our answers, we emptied the contents of the socks into oversized test tubes, and discussed the differences between the amounts and how we can use visual discrimination to compare amounts instead of counting.

 

There were a lot of skills involved in this process including screwing the test tube lids on and off (L has been doing this for a while, but E is finally figuring it out), and figuring out how to transfer blocks from the socks into the test tubes without spilling them on the floor.  We also shook the test tubes and listened to the sound they made.  I got out the scale and we weighed the groups of blocks.  They understood the concept that the heavier side will be lower.  Then I let them play with the scale all on their own, and they had fun putting various objects in each side.  E really enjoyed putting objects in the little drawer too.

I'll definitely revisit this activity a couple more times as they get older, but overall it provided over an hour's worth of fun exploration, making it a success.