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Math activities
MATH - Home Practice
Below are some activities that your child can do at home to help develop his/her math skills.
Logical Thinking
* Classify blocks by size (i.e. small, medium, and large)
* Sort crayons, markers, and pencils into containers
* Sort laundry
* Sort objects, such as buttons, keys, coins, pasta, cereal, fabric or paper scraps, marbles, balls, stamps, postcards, jar
lids, leaves, shells, playing cards, etc. and explain why
* Sort toys for storage, such as zoo and farm animals
* Go on a shape or color hunt (in a book/magazine or around the house)
* Compare sets using the terms more and less (i.e. "There are more crayons than pencils.")
* Estimate how many items are inside a grocery bag - count to see if the estimation was correct
Measurement
* Measure shoes, height, length of table, etc. with yarn or hands
* Use blocks to build towers with length or height equal to other objects
* Count the number of steps it takes to get somewhere
* Measure ingredients for cooking
Shapes
* Hunt for shapes throughout the room
* Hunt for shapes in a magazine, cut them out, and paste them on a page
* Create a drawing using a variety of shapes
* Trace shapes then color them
* Use 20 inch long shoelaces or string to create shapes or numerals by placing the laces/string on top of shapes or numerals that are written on paper
Numerals
* Tell how many of each body parts a person has - How many eyes, ears, chins, fingers, etc.
* Use ten index cards - on the left-hand side of each, write a numeral from 1 to 10 - then, on the right side, punch a matching number of holes with a hole punch
* Number the inside bottoms of six paper baking cups from 1 to 6 -place the baking cups in a 6-cup muffin tin - get 21 counters (pennies, small buttons, beans, etc.) - identify the numerals in the bottoms of the paper baking cups and drop in the corresponding numbers of counters
* Make a blank book by stapling 10 pieces of white paper together with a colored paper cover - write "My Counting Book" on the cover and number the pages in the book from 1 to 10 - look through magazines or catalogs and tear or cut out small pictures - glue one picture on the first page of the book, two pictures on the second page and so on
* Practice counting - by the end of the school year, your child should be able to count by 1s to 100, count by 10s to 100, count by 5s to 50, count by 2s to 20, and count backwards from 20
* Count the telephone poles as you pass them when in a car - this not only practices counting but also gives children a sense of rhythm and its relationship to time and space
* Look for numbers in the environment, like the numbers on street signs, storefronts, or license plates - talk about the different things people use numbers for: like finding things, naming things, or giving out other information like prices
* Parent thinks of a number between 1 and 10 (or 1 and 20, etc.) - give your child clues like "bigger" or "smaller" and ask him/her to guess the number - this will help your child develop a "mental number line" as he/she thinks about different numbers and how they relate to one another
* Practice basic addition and subtraction (i.e. "We have 3 plates and 3 bowls on the counter...how many all together?"
or "We bought 5 apples and today we ate 2 of them...how many apples do we have left?")
* Play board games, using a spinner or dice
Patterns
* Make patterns with beads or blocks (i.e. red, blue, red, blue, or red, red, blue, red, red, blue or red, blue, green, red, blue, green)
* Explore patterns in wallpaper, gift wrap, clothing, furniture, music, etc.
* Create patterns using sponge painting, collage materials, geometric shapes, gift wrap, wall paper, etc.
