Math Skills for All Ages

The first chapter in Count on Math: Activities for Small Hands and Lively Minds contains many activities for exploration. I went into this first chapter thinking I had failed my children in giving them the most opportunities to develop their minds, so I started filling our time with these activities as if we were on a race against time.

I planned all these things and got very frustrated when things did not go as I wanted. "My kids need to explore!" I thought. Or what? Something bad will happen? For one of the activities, I collected jar lids, but nobody was interested in the lids except K (1 1/2 yrs old). I gathered rocks and spread them out on the table, but M & R said to me, "We want to play with beans." Beans was another activity recommended in the book, but we had done that one already.

Then one afternoon, I gave K a paper cup to carry around the backyard with her. She filled it with 2 rocks, a stick, and some flowers, and then brought it back to me to show me what she had found. She was exploring, on her own, without any intervention from me. As long as I did not plop her in front of the TV, she would be exploring, and thinking back to the games M & R used to play, they were always exploring too. In the spring when I planted my flowers, M & R spent hours filling buckets with dirt and transferring the dirt from one bucket to another.

So if exploration happens, what do we need the book Count on Math: Activities for Small Hands and Lively Minds for? Many of the activities are so simple that they do not need any extra planning, and we normally have the tools and supplies needed already on hand. So I built a loose framework by putting notes in a text document in a table format. If we needed something to do, I would scan my notes, grab an activity that we could do easily, and mark it off my list.

What I found was that with this easy framework, I could get all three girls involved in learning the same skills using many of the same activities.

Exploration
While M & R wanted to explore beans, K played in the dirt, and they all loved to play with the water toys and explore water.

Spatial Awareness
M & R had their obstacle course and colored pictures that were taped to the bottom of the coffee table while K played hide and go seek in the closets. Then they all had fun together with building forts and playing pirate with the coffee table turned upside down as their boat.

Classification
M & R had already talked much about eye color and classifying the different members of our family by eye color. M has hazel eyes like Mommy and Grammy while R has brown eyes like Daddy and Memaw, and K's eyes are blue like Papa's. So it was very easy to expand this classifying, especially as we were learning to classify animals for our science lessons.

Patterns
We are currently studying patterns. M likes making up her own patterns. She uses blocks, people, and words. "Is that a pattern?" she will ask. And I take every opportunity to point out patterns to R, who at 3 1/2 is still just grasping the idea. And I started an action game with K, "Clap, Clap, Roll [your hands], Put your fingers up high, Reach down and touch your toes."

So the book Count on Math: Activities for Small Hands and Lively Minds has a lot of fun activities that can be applied to ages 1 to 5 and helps you develop a lot of fresh ideas in keep children busy and active.