Water Displacement Observation Many of our best learning moments start with simple conversations. Today during lunch, N was (per usual) not focusing on his food. Instead of eating, he was dipping his hand in and out of his water cup. As I started explaining explain that he was making his water dirty, he interrupted me. […] Read more…
While all the other kids were busy building forts and playing in water tables, J wandered over to this rock with a divot that had collected water. Someone (probably a staff member) had left out an old paintbrush and J picked it up and started dipping it in the puddle and “water painting” on another rock. Ha! Why had I never thought of that?! No prep work needed, almost no supplies, no mess to clean up, and endless directions to pursue — use a paintbrush, sponges, roll toy cars through water, make water paint footprints and handprints, practice calligraphy, draw Anything you can think of, even do math on the sidewalk! … etc. Here’s an activity we could do at home any day for FREE (1 point!) that’s clean (2 points!) and fun (3 points!). (Points are nonredeemable but fun to collect.) Read more…
On the ride back home we talked about how if he throws one rock down the mountain it might knock loose two more rocks, which isn’t really a problem — except that each of those rocks might knock two more rocks (to keep the math simple) and each of those rocks might knock two more rocks each, and pretty quickly all the rocks are falling down the mountain. N looked properly terrified.
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… Then I brought out the craft supplies and cut out a circle, square, and rectangle from construction paper. He helped me trace each one several times to see what the pattern would look like. I asked him what was different about the repeating circles and the repeating squares/rectangles designs. He had a lot of random thoughts on the topic, but eventually mentioned that there are empty spaces between the circles but not between the squares and rectangles. He got it! 🙂 … Read more…
My 4 year old son and I sat down to brainstorm some more silly words (rhyming words or alliteration phrases or just plain silly sounds) and we (ok, mostly I) came up with this story. It’s fun to get him involved in the creative writing process so he can see how to get ideas flowing onto paper, then mash them all up and jumble them back together until they fall into place and you get a silly story. 🙂 That’s our official process at the moment. Read more…
Things (numbers, variables, expressions) on either side of an equal sign are the same. If kids can really understand this idea, they won’t stumble when they get to Algebra and have to start solving for x. If they can grasp the big ideas behind simple concepts like Equality, they’ll be much more fluent with higher level math concepts.
I wanted to practice introducing these ideas to my (then) 3 year old. I found some things we had at home and made up a very simplistic balance beam. Using egg carton pieces, a paper clip flattened out, and a toilet paper tube shaped into a triangular prism, I asked N to try to make it balance (stay level) using different amounts of cotton balls on each side. Read more…
The tale of the biker man has evolved into a series of stories (The Biker Man Chronicles, perhaps?). We’ve been on a silly-story-telling spree lately, and I had fun working with these particular ones to make them into fun tongue-twister stories.
So here’s the prequel to the story of the Biker man from my last post. Read more…
Besides answering All the Questions, another fun activity we like to do on long car rides is make up silly stories. N and I got rolling (umm, no pun intended) on a pretty silly story the other day and he helped me recall it tonight so we could be authors and write our very own book. Read more…
… At first we practiced filling up the spaces with shells and counting them until N got familiar enough with the visual that he could tell me at a glance how many shells there were (for numbers 1 – 10). Then I filled up the first one with 10 shells and put a few shells in the next 10-frame so he could see that for numbers greater than 10, you don’t have to start counting from 1 every time — you know there’s already 10, so you can just add on. Here’s our visual of the number 14, which is clearly, from the diagram, 10 + 4.
Then I extended the idea to include adding two numbers that were each less than 10. For example, I set 5 shells in the top 10-frame and 7 in the bottom one. Then he would take shells out of the bottom one to fill up missing spaces in the top one. So 5 + 7 became 10 + 2, since the 7 shells were used to fill up the 5 empty spaces and there were 2 left over. Then we went back to the previous idea of counting on from a full 10-frame to find out that there were 12 altogether. … Read more…
The other day, as we were driving, N noticed a sign on a store that had a picture of 3 raindrops. He asked us about it, but it took a lot of explaining on his part to get us to understand what he was talking about, since us grown-ups have lost the superpower of Looking Up and Noticing New Things.
When I finally found the sign he was looking at, I explained that it was that company’s logo. Of course this, as with everything, only led to more questions. We ended up having a great mini-marketing crash course that might be roughly summarized with the following points. (You’ll have to imagine “whys?” inserted after every. single. statement to get the full impact of the moment.) Read more…
