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.
