Posts Tagged ‘mathematics’
Thinking About Mathematics
A while back, someone wrote to me asking about math and workbooks, and recently a couple others have asked some similar questions, so I thought I’d bring the topic here to share some of my thoughts about it. Here’s the initial inquiry and my responses: “My [Read More]
Playing with Color Tiles & Cubes
We’ve enjoyed lots of games and activities with one inch wooden color tiles and cubes. Here are a few of the highlights. Scoop and Sort: Scoop a handful of tiles and sort them into various piles, columns, or groupings of colors. How many of each color do you have? [Read More]
What do you see?
When you’re walking around in your everyday life, do you see the mathematics all around you? Do you notice shapes, sizes, angles, and patterns? Do you see the potential for counting and sorting and comparing items? Not as lessons, but just as cool things to [Read More]
Playing with Geoboards
Geoboards come in a variety of sizes and patterned grids, and they’re lots of fun to play with using an assortment of colorful rubber bands. You can create repetitive designs, six-pointed stars, triangles, squares, hexagons, rectangles, and all kinds of other shapes. [Read More]
Playing with Cuisenaire Rods
Cuisenaire rods are colorful wooden rods ranging from 1cm to 10cm lengths. They’re great for creating patterns, counting, sorting, measuring, adding, multiplying, and all sorts of other fun explorations. Although the rods were originally created for formalized classroom [Read More]
Making Comparisons
Earlier this week, I found some old notes I had written about playing with pattern blocks and Cuisenaire rods when Ben was about seven years old. We had been stacking the pattern blocks into towers and measuring them with the Cuisenaire rods. While doing this, we made [Read More]
Fun Frames for Block Designs
Designing and playing with wooden blocks of all kinds can be lots of fun. Sometimes it’s nice to use a frame to give yourself a specific space in which to work. A wooden serving tray with raised edges works well as a frame for playing with square color tiles, [Read More]
Playing with Pattern Blocks
Wooden pattern blocks are wonderful in so many ways. You can create designs with them, build with them, and play games with them. You can talk about their colors, shapes, angles, and how they relate to each other. You can lay them out in repetitive patterns or beautiful [Read More]
Puzzles For All Ages
Lots of people like puzzles. They’re fun to work on individually or with friends. Some people like abstract puzzles on paper or in books, while others like the hands-on, three-dimensional variety. Here are some of the many puzzles we’ve enjoyed over the [Read More]
Glorious Games!
We love all kinds of games. Over the years we’ve enjoyed a variety of board games, card games, and dice games. Here are a few of our favorites: Bananagrams Oh Scrud! Word fun with cards Apples to Apples: The Game of Hilarious Comparisons! SET: The Family Game of [Read More]