#33 For All Ages

For All Ages

Grown-ups: Searching for special numbers in nature has long traditions in many cultures, with mixed-bag results from beautiful geometry of the Pythagoreans to quackery such as numerology. Help children find beauty and fun in iconic quantities – without giving too much weight to random coincidences!

Babies: Babies can subitize at birth, and have rather impressive powers of pattern recognition. Make collections of different designs with the same visual pattern: six dots as they are on a die, five marks as they are on the playing card, and so on.

Toddlers and Young Kids: Toddlers can go on scavenger hunts themselves, either for a given iconic quantity, or for all quantities they can find in a room or a park. Help them photograph or sketch. Invite kids to play matching and sorting games with their pictures. For example, you can make a set of cards for the game “Memory,” with each matched pair showing the same quantity with different objects.

Big Kids: Older children enjoy finding their favorite numbers everywhere and expanding their notion of numbers with beauties such as the golden mean or Pi. They can also hunt for interesting ways to represent number properties, such as solving “The ants are marching one by one…” puzzle with manipulatives.