Some recent math activities

Now that I have a printer again, I can print out these pattern block patterns from prekinders.com.  Bear loves them (and taking some of the blocks out of the huge container in which they came and putting them in that basket has done wonders to draw her - and her brother - to them over and over again).

We'll be doing more with the scale this week to go with reading the book Measuring Penny by Loreen Leedy.  Here, Bear is just playing with the different weights and actually putting them in and out of the drawer.  I did a demonstration for her of how the scale could be used to compare the weights of different pattern blocks.

The Montessori number rods.  Bear surprisingly learned to recognize numerals really quickly.  I know Montessori says not to introduce math until much later, but Bear seems to be in a sensitive period for it now, much more than for reading.  The rods actually do help her count with one-to-one correspondence more than separate counters.  She sometimes counts slower than her finger points, so she'll be pointing to the fifth counter but only saying the word "three."

Sticking toothpicks into styrofoam is a fun way to practice counting and one-to-one correspondence.

Here we took her "Feel and Find" game and sorted the colors into a graph.  J-jo was a bit of a distraction.

And lastly, a game Bear just wasn't ready for (the recommended age was 4), but was worth trying - we'll try it again in a month and see if she is more interested.

The idea came from the book Family Math for Young Children.  We called it Making Button Salad.  

Typically the script went like this:

"I have three red buttons in my salad.  There are three yellow buttons for each red button.  How many buttons are there?"

It wasn't that Bear couldn't count them and tell me the number, it was just that she had no interest at all in doing the activity.