Mr Potato Head Is Good At Math
I recently borrowed a large basket full of Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head parts and my son and I played a fun game with lots of math in it. It went something like this:
Step 1 – I taped out a small grid on the floor using blue painters tape – this was Mr. Potato Head’s apartment building
Step 2 – I placed different elements in the cells in the column and row headers – different types of hats, shoes, different noses
Step 3 – I asked my son to put together a Mr. Potato Head that lived in a particular cell apartment.
I explained how a Mr. Potato Head in each cell would have a combination of two elements from a row and a column that, intersecting, form his apartment. Once these two elements were in place, my son could choose whatever other parts he wanted to complete a Potato Head (the funnier, the better).
Once all apartments were occupied, we took a few Potatoes out of their cells (the more active and adventurous few since the rest turned out to be couch potatoes). Naturally, after a while they had to be returned to their exact apartments. It was like playing the game in reverse and it was much harder (to simplify the task, make sure that the rest of the Mr Potato Head’s parts are the same – same eyes, ears, arms, etc).
This game can be played with just a couple of Mr. Potato Heads (you can change the scenario to Mr. Potato Head has to wear a disguise as he moves around the grid). Even if you only have 1 Potato Head and not enough accessories, you can still play this game by drawing the grid and the elements on paper.
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Peas and Carrots Math
A few days ago my 5-year old and I were busy picking peas in our vegetable garden. The 30 or so pea pods looked so delicious, that we decided to eat them right away. And since shelling pea pods takes some time, we had a moment or two for the all-about-peas math:
- Each pod snaps into two halves length-wise. Let’s count how many peas are in each half?
- How many peas are altogether in each pea pod? Let’s count them to make sure.
- Can you see without counting how many peas are in each half?
- Can you tell how many peas are in a pod without counting? (this can be done either with subitizing or by adding peas from the two halves)
- Which half has more peas in it?
- Does this pea pod have more peas in it than the one before?
- Can you divide peas from this pod between the two of us so we both get the same number of peas? Why? Why not?
- How many peas do you think will be in this pod? (keep track of this data; we found out that most of the time we had pea pods with 7 peas in it; 5 was also pretty common; only a few pods had 3 peas in them; just one had 8 peas; there were several pods that appeared to have 6 peas, but on closer examination we would always fine the 7th tiny pea at the tip of the pod)
- Do you think we will get a pea pod with no peas in it? With 100 peas in it?
- What do we find more often – pea pods with odd or even number of peas?
Now summer carrots are almost ready for picking. I’m thinking we might explore gradients (length, thickness, weight, taste), fractals (carrot leaves), measurements (including how tall are you measured in carrots).
Have you tried garden math? Share your story in the comments or link to your blog post.
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Grids – Making Art with Math
As we are getting ready for the Moebius Noodles display, we continue to be on high alert for great ideas that introduce grids to children. So I was really excited to see an art through math activity for young children on one of my favorite blogs, The Educators’ Spin On It.
The idea is to use grids to help make a copy of a picture. Inspired by a local chalk art festival, Amanda of the Educators’ blog decided to create chalk art with her children. The results are beautiful and Amanda documents the entire process with wonderful photographs (which she so generously allowed me to use in this post).
Amanda notes that even toddlers can participate in this activity. And the idea lends itself easily to customization based on your child’s interests. Amanda chose a picture of the beautiful St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow to reproduce. Your child might be more interested in something else (I’m pretty sure that mine is going to ask for either WALL-E or a Star Wars clone trooper).
You can also choose a different art medium – paints, crayons, markers, even thumb prints (hey, that would be a fun idea to try). Or, if your child has a favorite picture that’s very large (say, poster-size), you can try making a smaller version of it.
Thank you, Amanda!
If you haven’t yet, do read Amanda’s entire post, get inspired and try it this weekend! When you do this activity with your children, take pictures. You can upload them to Facebook and share them on our page. Or you can post them to your blog and link to the post on our Facebook page or in the comments.
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Turn Your Child’s Bed Time into Fun Math Time
If you are like me, you are frequently short on time. And when we finally get an unexpected spare moment, we are so tired and so caught off guard, that it’s hard to figure out a fun math activity to do with our children. Yet even in the busiest household, there is that most structured time of the day, bedtime, when we and the kids are winding down and getting ready for the nightly bedtime story.
Laura Overdeck shows how to add a few moments of math to our children’s bedtime routines with her daily Bedtime Math Problems.
YELENA: How did Bedtime Math get started? Why bedtime?
LAURA: My husband John and I have been giving fun, mildly mischievous bedtime math problems to our kids for 6 years. When I started mentioning our habit to friends, many said it had never even occurred to them to do math alongside reading a story. People started saying I should write a book or a blog. I’d never written down our math problems, but decided to try emailing them out. And now here we are, exactly three months later, with thousands of people reading them!
I think it’s catching on because we hooked it to a daily routine: bedtime. Interestingly, there’s a whole crowd that instead does it at dinnertime, another regular ritual. There’s also a bathtime crowd.
YELENA: You have been doing bedtime math with your children since they were very young. How do parents know when their children are “ready” for bedtime math?
LAURA: I don’t think there’s any such thing as not being ready for math. No one says it’s harmful to read a story to a 3-month-old, right? So why not count with them? Why do we feel different about it? Society has a real bias on this that we hope to undo. Kids love attention from their parents, and they find counting entertaining even before they understand what numbers are. When they eat Cheerios off the high-chair tray, or you spoon them into their little mouths, you can count to them. They love it.
YELENA: What are your tips for parents of children who are afraid of or bored with math?
LAURA: Wow. It’s such a common problem with so many causes. One, of course, is that the parents are afraid of math, so parent job #1 is to avoid saying “I just can’t do math” or “I always hated math.” It’s so important for kids not to hear that!!
Many kids are also turned off by math at school, because the materials are incredibly dry and sanitized. So the best thing is to show your kids that math is a part of things they already love to do. Unless you point it out, they often don’t notice. It’s good to start with simple numbers, too, so they immediately feel confident and are open to more. Some great activities:
- Baking: Doubling recipes requires multiplying; cutting in half requires dividing; measuring 1/4-cups or 1/4-tsps uses fractions. At a more basic level, kids love counting out chocolate chips.
- Building: Anything that involves measuring gets kids counting, adding, and multiplying. My daughter (now age 8 ) still loves taping together squares and rectangles of cardboard to make houses and furniture for her doll. Lego and other building toys revolve around numbers, too.
- Planning: For example, setting up party favors. They’re all sold in different quantities: 10 in one pack, 24 in another, 18 in a third. If there are 16 kids coming over, how many packs of each do you need, and what’s left over? Even putting out breakfast or dinner takes some planning and counting.
YELENA: It is no secret that many parents experience math anxiety themselves. How can they overcome it?
LAURA: That brings us right to Bedtime Math. I’ve always known that the first audience we have to reach is the parents. That’s why the topics often have a more grown-up spin, so they hook the adults. Parents – particularly moms, since unfortunately there’s a gender gap – have said how much they appreciate a fun and real-world thing that involves math. To beat down that anxiety, parents can also delve into the same activities listed above to hook kids.
YELENA: Bedtime Math’s daily math problems have variations for children with different skill levels. How should parents choose which level of difficulty to offer to their children? And how can parents help a child to move to the next level while maintaining interest?
LAURA: We purposefully don’t assign age ranges or grade levels to the levels, so parents don’t get anxious about their children’s progress. Bedtime Math is all meant to be fun.
From what I hear, most kids start at the wee-one level no matter what their age, and work their way up until they get stuck. But even a little kid who’s only adding can tackle the big-kid problems with help, if the parent takes the time. A 5-year-old might not know how to multiple 6 x 8, but if you count on fingers.
YELENA: What other math activities do you do with your children? What are some of your favorite math books, games and/or toys?
LAURA: Interestingly, we don’t have a lot of formal math toys or flash cards in our house – I‘m having trouble thinking of any! Math is simply a quiet undercurrent in everything we do. Our kids have played mostly with dice, coins (once we knew they wouldn’t swallow them), cups of water or sand, stopwatches, and food. We do like counting books: our favorites include Dorling-Kindersley’s My Little Counting Book; Curious George’s 1 to 10 and Back Again; for wee ones, How Many Hearts?; and for older ones, Math Curse. On the game front, Scrabble is an awesome way to teach math, just picking out the “easy” letters and making words on the board. That’s great for reading, too.
YELENA: Your daily math questions always start with a little story or some interesting facts. How can parents learn this skill – to see math opportunities in everyday experiences?
LAURA: I think the best starting point is to look at your favorite objects and activities, and your kids’ favorites. Anything that involves quantities is an opportunity to count: Lego blocks, stuffed animals, candy. Anything that involves motion is a chance to measure time, distance and speed. And absolutely any object can be measured with a ruler, or weighed on a scale. It’s mindblowing to find out what some things actually weigh: a cubic foot of wet sand weighs 100 pounds! (I didn’t believe it till I weighed it myself). Numbers are everywhere, and favorite objects are a great jumping-off point.
YELENA: One of your hobbies is Lego Mindstorms. Have you tried programming your Mindstorms with your children? What are some of your favorite resources for introducing programming concepts to young children?
LAURA: Yes, I got into Mindstorms because my 6-year-old son desperately wanted them! He can now build and program his own simple robots. Robotics propel kids’ skills on so many levels: logic and process, spatial relations, fine motor skills…and best of all, math. You need to set how many times the motors turn the wheels, for how many seconds, and so on. We also like MIT’s Scratch as a fun, kid-friendly environment to learn programming.
YELENA: Thank you so much, Laura! Bedtime Math problems have quickly become a fun addition to our daily routine. The way you tie math to real life situations through short stories and trivia makes it easy to weave math into our dinner-time and bedtime conversations.
If you haven’t had a chance to visit Laura’s blog and sign up for daily problems to be sent straight to your email, check it out!
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