Book Club Week 5 {Math and Magic in Wonderland}

Chapter 5 of the math adventure novel Math and Magic in Wonderland, is full of visual puzzles and "math art".  Crafts are always a big hit around here, and those involving fractals and tessellations were no exception.  Here's what we did...

Book Club Week 4 {Math and Magic in Wonderland}

In chapter 4 of the math adventure novel Math and Magic in Wonderland, we draw circles, find their centers, understand what Pi really represents, and learn about the "rabbit trails" that famous scientist followed.  Kids always do great with geometry because it is so easy to visualize.  I bought my twins new compasses in the "back to school" section of a local store (only about a dollar!) and they spent a lot of time making circle art and investigating the properties of circles...

Math Game {Sums of Ten}

Here's a fun math game to make with leftover plastic Easter eggs.  I've seen Easter egg activities for Preschool-age kids (matching capital letters with lower case letters, for example), so I thought I'd make a game for my 1st graders.. making sums of ten...

Graphing Rainbow Goldfish Crackers

Here is another easy edible math activity that kids just adore...  When my children begged for some rainbow goldfish crackers, I put a bunch into a bowl made a curious face and started asking them questions:  How many fish do you think are in there?  (More than 100?  More than 10?).  Which color fish do you think there are the most of?  etc..  After piquing their interest, the girls were eager to investigate further...

Venn Diagrams for Little Kids

Classification of data is a critical skill for life, and even infants and toddlers naturally organize things in the world around them.  You don't have to wait until the upper elementary years to introduce Venn Diagrams - it's a concept that even Preschoolers can understand.  Here's how I introduced Venn Diagrams to my 3-year-olds..

Pumpkin Delivery Math Game {Learning Place Value}

There is no game my girls (3 years old) like more than feeding their 'babies'.  Every math manipulative we've ever played with has become food for stuffed animals.  My kids were delighted when they woke up one morning last week and discovered that all their favorite stuffed animals (as well as Mom and Dad) had placed breakfast orders for miniature pumpkins.  This Pumpkin Delivery math game that I made up was such a big hit at our house at we ended up playing it every day for the entire week.  My kids had so much fun that they didn't realize they were practicing fine motor skills, counting, one-to-one correspondence, number recognition, reading, and even discovering the meaning of place value!  Here's how to play...

Magic Number Cups: Six Math Games With Paper Cups

I think I've mentioned before on this blog that I love math manipulatives.  Our homeschool closet is piled high with a gazillion things (plastic bears, blocks, coins, beads, pom-poms, you name it) that can be counted, sorted, and used for learning mathematical concepts.  It seems, however, that my kids are just as enthralled when I take out the homemade manipulatives as the store-bought ones, and that they can be as simple as a bunch of paper cups labeled with numbers.  Now of course I didn't introduce these as "look at what your Mom made for you in less than a minute out of cheap stuff that was lying around the house", but rather as Magic Number Cups.  I quickly came up with a variety of activities to do with them...

Math Games with Animal Counters

My twins (age 3) are obsessed with little animal figures.  Somehow we've ended up with hundreds of them!  When we moved, I rediscovered a tub of 60 plastic animal counters (5 each of 12 animals), and the girls begged to play with them all week.   Here are some easy games I came up with to reinforce math and logic skills for my Preschoolers...

Early Learning Fun with Unit Blocks

We have a big tub of unit blocks (each is one centimeter square, weight one gram) which I've been using with the girls when we play with our bucket scale (see our Blocks in Socks activity).  This morning while I was trying to catch up on some work, I let L and E (33 months) do some exploration and play with these unit blocks.  Later, I joined them and made up lots of fun math, spatial vitalization, and fine motor skills activities.....

Exploration with the Number Balance

I am obsessed with math manipulatives because they provide such a good way to really understand math concept and are so much fun for kids (and..um..Mommy) to play with.  I purchased this Number Balance a while ago, and decided that now that the girls are starting to understand addition, I could take it out...