#73 For All Ages
For All Ages
Grown-ups: Find covariance in nature, culture, or different professions and represent it as a grid. What Montessori did with beads, you can do with growing plant measurements or company statistics.
Babies: Babies don’t play turn-based games. Draw covariance grids as the baby watches, and put pictures up on walls. Cut out two cells. Point at one of the empty spaces. Let the baby guess (by pointing or grabbing one of the cut-outs) which of the two should go into that empty space.
Toddlers and Young Kids: Young kids tend to change rules mid-grid, whenever a creative idea strikes. Help them be consistent by starting a new grid with their new cool rule, but keeping the old grid following the old rule. Toddlers enjoy large grids, with objects calling for different senses: heavier and heavier weights, sweeter and sweeter juice/water mixtures and so on.
Big Kids: Older kids make rather complicated grid rules, to make guessing harder. This leads them to explore new functions. Kids may get into arguments: the guesser may find an equivalent way to describe the same function, for example, “double the number” versus “add the number to itself.” Support experimentation: try both rules and see if they always give the same answers. If so, functions are equivalent! How many equivalent ways can your child find to describe each grid’s function?
