June 2018

When creating the Little Wise Toys’ range for 3-6 year olds, part of the concept was to create a fun and interactive learning bridge between home and early years/early school settings.  As part of this, and as a complimentary range of activities to the Little Wise Box of Maths, I would love to share some other fun maths activities that you can weave into your day using everyday objects.  This blog post suggests some ideas.

When at home…

– Cooking together and letting children help with weighing and counting out spoonfuls and measurements.
– Sorting washing together by size and colour; and pairing up socks.
– Creating shapes out of different objects, such as coins or forks.
– Sorting and organising coins and notes into different piles.
– Cutting toast into squares and triangles.
– Model building with recycled breakfast cereal boxes etc and exploring different shapes and sizes.
– Marking everybody’s height on the wall and seeing who is the tallest, the shortest, and who comes in the middle.
– Writing a selection of numbers on a chalk board. When you call out a number they have to identify it and squirt it with water.
– Exploring position by moving an item into different locations and asking if it is on top of, underneath, in front of, behind, to the left of/or the right etc.
– Hunting for different things in your garden and counting how many you can spot (bugs, birds, stones, colours, trees and so on).

When out and about…

– Exploring the numbers on the number plates (e.g. see who can spot the number 2 on the parked cars while walking down the street; and have a go adding the numbers in the number plate up).
– Reading the numbers on the doors while walking down the street (and talking about different number patterns – e.g. odd numbers and even numbers).
– Getting the little one involved when out shopping – reading price tags, counting apples and other items, sorting coins and comparing weights (the heaviest and the lightest etc).
– Counting how many streetlamps, letter boxes, cats and so on you can spot on your walks; and how many steps you take getting from A to B.

I hope you find these suggestions useful and here’s to lots of fun exploring maths and learning through play.

– Go on a treasure hunt to find as many objects of one shape you can around the house, and then sort the objects into different shape piles.
–  Create different shapes using coins and other items you have lying around. Make large versions, smaller versions, and look at how close or far away the shapes are from each other.
– Cut out different shapes from a piece of paper and decorate each one in different ways with glue and paper, pens, pencils and paints.
– Find objects that you can paint one side of and stamp shapes lines onto paper (such as the end of a toilet roll or a pot lid).
– Play ‘eye spy the shape square (etc)’ when walking down the street and the other person has to spot as many things as they can of the chosen shape.
– Hide lots of different shaped items in a container with shredded paper and play lucky dip by pulling out the different objects and naming the shape that is picked.
– Cut out different sizes of the same shape and stack them on top of each other, starting with the biggest first and then getting smaller as you go on.