Geometric Chalk Art in the Outdoor Classroom

Have masking tape and sidewalk chalk? Then you can invite children to create amazing geometric artwork outdoors in just a few steps! 

Create the outline of the art by placing tape on the ground in different designs. I personally like creating a large square or rectangle and then using various shapes to fill the area inside. 

Invite children to colour each section using a different colour of chalk. 

Remove the tape to reveal the gorgeous design!

Experiment with different designs...

...and encourage children to to use the art when inventing and playing their own games!

Holiday Sweaters

A fun activity this time of year is to decorate ugly holiday sweaters with a variety of loose parts! This activity promotes math as children create patterns on the sweaters. An interesting discussion of the differences between area and perimeter usually emerges as children use strings of beads to outline the sweater while filling it in with seasonal trinkets.

           

Click here for a copy of the free printable sweater page.
 

 

Ten Easy Holiday Math Activities

The holidays are such a lovely time of year to spend with children! However the last few weeks before the winter break can be hectic. Here are ten easy to assemble activities that can infuse playtime with math by capturing the magic of the season! Many of the seasonal loose parts included in these photos were found at the local dollar store. Enjoy!

1. Count the Presents - offer children mini presents (or other seasonal trinkets including bells or ornaments) and number cards. Encourage children to match the corresponding number of objects to the cards. Children can also place presents on a laminated ten frame and write a corresponding addition or subtraction sentence using a dry erase marker.

2.  Holiday Sensory Bin with Mini Boxes - fill a sensory bin with seasonal trinkets and treasures. Add mini present boxes and encourage children to fill the boxes with different objects. Children can then use a hundreds grid to count how many objects fit in each box!

 

  

3. Catapult the Gingerbread Man to Safety - help mini Gingerbread Men land to safety over the river by firing them using catapults made from clothespins attached to blocks using elastics. This activity works fine motor muscles too!

4. Cookie Cutter Bell Count - display a collection of bells in a tray with a variety of seasonal cookie cutters. Challenge children to fill one cutter with bells and use a hundreds grid to count how many it holds. Which cutter holds the most? Least?

5. What's Inside the Presents? - fill different holiday boxes with loose parts. Encourage children to shake one at a time and estimate how many objects might be inside. They can then open the box and spill the objects out. Each object can be placed on a number grid and counted.

6. Fill a Tree with Trinkets - children can explore the concepts of area and perimeter by filling or outlining wooden trees (or other seasonal place mats or shapes) with a variety of bead strings, ribbons or small objects.

7. String a Pattern - secure a number of green pipe cleaners to a sturdy cardstock or cardboard base in the form of a tree. Encourage children to string beads to 'decorate' the tree using different patterns. Children can also count how many beads they use for each section.

 

8. How Many Elastics? - children can wrap a number of elastics around cookie cutters until they are filled. Encourage children to count how many times they wrap each elastic. For an added fine motor challenge have children remove the elastics one at a time.

9. Gingerbread House STEM Challenge - provide children with magnet shapes and challenge them to build an intricate gingerbread house. Ask them to search the room for various loose parts that will attach to the magnets and 'decorate' the house (e.g., here the staples in mini bows attract to the magnets).

10. Holiday Guessing Jars - fill glass jars with seasonal loose parts. Encourage children to estimate how many objects are in each jar. The objects can then be shaken out and counted using math tools such as number grids and ten frames.

 

 

Looking for a book to support holiday math learning? Check out my book Holiday Math! 

 

 

How Many Petals? How Explicit Math Instruction Transitions to Child-Centred Learning

In my experience as an Additional Qualifications instructor, one of the most commonly asked questions is how to find a balance in FDK between teacher guided and child-led activities. In an emergent program is it okay for the teacher to take the lead and initiate activities? Do whole group times always have to revolve around the children's interests or is it okay to veer in a new direction? How do adult created invitations for learning transition into child-centred explorations? What does this look like in a real classroom?

Today I set up a beautiful math invitation for children drawn from the text Reggio-Inspired Mathematics (Novakowski, 2015). From our recent experiences discussing nature in our yard in our Beautiful Tree Project I know that our children gravitate to interesting living things. This weekend I did some gardening at my home and picked some of the most interesting flowers I had. I wanted to engage the children as soon as they walked into the classroom in the morning. Not only were the colours vivid, the smell from the combination of flowers could be noticed throughout the room. Each flower had a velvety soft feel and the variety of shapes and textures was interesting to look at. This collection appealed to the children's many senses and was irresistible upon entry into our room. 

Along with the vase I placed many varied, colourful close up photos of other kinds of flowers not displayed in the vase, writing materials (small child-sized clipboards are always more fun to use and easier for the children to handle on an already cozy table), and small wooden blocks. During our first play block the children had open investigation of the invitation. Some smelled the flowers and moved on, others sketched the arrangement, some played with only the wooden blocks.

         

During our opening circle I brought the materials to the carpet and invited the children to discuss them. I asked them to reflect upon and share what they had experienced at the centre during playtime; I wanted them to describe what they saw, what they noticed about the flowers, what they wondered about the materials. I read the sign included in the centre "How many petals altogether?" and encouraged them to consider my question about the flowers.

Many children were interested in the idea that we could count the number of petals and offered suggestions for how to do this.  One child wanted to place one block on each petal of all the flowers and count them to get a total.

Another child thought that each flower petal should first be counted in the vase and then the same number of blocks could be represented in a collection next to it.

After discussing the suggestions and ending our circle time, the children flowed back into the play activities. We noticed that many new children visited the flower activity and were quite eager to see if they could calculate the petals.

Some children represented the totals with blocks and then transcribed the total as a number on the paper...

...others placed the blocks on the pictures and then drew the flower with the corresponding number of blocks...

...and some created addition sentences after putting blocks on many pictures and wanting to discover a total number of petals in all the pictures.

One child spent a long time at the centre. I observed her play; she experimented with stacking and organizing the blocks in many different ways, finally arriving at the following arrangement. When I asked her to explain her work, this is what she said:

"I put one block in the middle where the pollen is. I put one block on each petal, so that's 5. Then I put blocks on the outside of the flower. I wanted to see its outline."

Fascinated by her work, I continued the conversation by reminding her of our work with the tree circumferences in our current outdoor exploration. I introduced the term 'perimeter' and helped model and explain for her that we could find the perimeter of any object including the two dimensional pictures of the flowers at the centre. This is the sort of beautiful evolution of teacher-initiated activities that emerge when children are able to manipulate materials freely and creatively in their own time and space. Educators who engage in playful experiences together with children can first observe, question, introduce and then scaffold more complex math concepts with those children who appear engaged and interested. Discovering the perimeter of the flowers certainly was not what I had anticipated doing with the initial flower invitation, but this is where I was led by this child.

She was quite eager to record her ideas and our conversation and independently shared her math thinking in a written format. Her idea to help explain to others the meaning of perimeter included drawing a picture of the flower and then writing numbers on it to represent the number of blocks used for the outline.

It's my hope that by sharing this example it's evident that not only is it developmentally appropriate to share teacher invitations for explorations, they can be introduced during whole group time and then rediscovered by children in new and innovative ways. Had I first introduced this math invitation at circle the children might have not been as interested, or only counted the flower petals as modeled at the circle. However providing open-ended time for them to discover and explore the invitation before discussing it helped bring richer background knowledge and ideas to our collective exploration. Revisiting the materials after a free and then focused time working with the pictures and manipulatives might have encouraged more children to visit the centre or think more deeply or differently about the topic. As the educator in the space I am satisfied that the idea of counting the petals using manipulatives was explicitly introduced to the whole group and that I was able to meet individual children at their interest and ability levels, especially those that wanted to represent and add multiple flowers together, or measure the perimeter.

My next step for this activity will be to invite the children who visited the centre today to share their ideas (and photos of the experience) tomorrow during our consolidation and sharing circle as we ran out of time today. Perhaps this will help us introduce the idea of measuring perimeter to the whole group and encourage other children to think about measurement and the invitation in a different, more evolved way.