#64 Bring Variety
Bring Variety
Make your own “gradient stories” with toys. Select sets of your child’s favorite toys or pictures – horses, trucks, dolls – in groups of three or more sizes, and then make and find appropriately-sized objects for them. Use all senses for your gradients and invite kids to invent their own ways to sort: sound (loud to quiet, high to low), tone (dark to light), texture (rough to smooth), weight (heavy to light), and so on.
Make a gradient story about three characters, with several sets of objects sorted into a grid by their size. Use three planks or strips of paper under three columns, one per character. Now give your story different twists! What if sorting was the opposite, with the littlest character always getting the largest objects? A child may like this turn of events! You can change stories by moving whole columns in your grid. This helps children to see the structure of the grid. How many different stories can you make this way?
Explore color value and hues with gradients. Pour the same amount of water into several bowls, and add some food coloring to the first. Double the amount of food coloring for each following bowl, compared to the previous one. You can create beautiful artwork, such as collages, out of samples of paint chips, sorted into gradients by hue and value.
