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?

Filling Boxes: It’s fun to fill small shallow boxes with various patterns, colors, and numbers of tiles.

: How many ways can you play with the idea of one half?

: How many tiles of each color do you see in each box? Do you see a box with 4 yellow and 5 red? Do you see a box with 2 out of 6 parts yellow? How about 3 out of 9 parts red?

Square Fill-in Puzzles: How many different ways can you fill in the squares? What combination of tiles will you choose?

: How many different ways can you fill in the 2 by 2 squares?

: How many different ways can you fill in the 3 by 3 squares?

Roll a Rectangle: Partners take turns rolling a set of dice. Together, arrange color tiles into rectangles according to the numbers on the dice. For example, if you roll a 3 and a 4, then build a 3 by 4 rectangle; if you roll a 2 and a 5, then build a 2 by 5 rectangle. How many tiles are in each rectangle? How many different rectangles you can build?

: Dice Game: Roll a Rectangle

Spaghetti and Meatballs for All! by Marilyn Burns

This is a fun story about a woman who used 8 tables to seat 32 people for a big dinner gathering. As people arrived, they kept pushing the tables together and moving them around in different configurations which caused many problems related to the total number of people who could be seated.

: If you think of these sets of tiles as tables, how many people can sit at these various table arrangements? (Just one person per side.) Which arrangement will seat the most people? Which will seat the least?