“X” is very good at doing this by sight and does not need to try different holes. He seems to be able to visually work out which piece goes where even with new and unfamiliar puzzles.
Our Fraction pizza game arrived and Kenzie and Little “E” wanted to play with it right away. I was cooking dinner but gave the rules of the first game option a quick glance and then set them up on the kitchen floor to build their pizzas. I think that i need to have a proper read of the game options with this and a few practice runs as it does not seem to be very strait forward. The first thing we worked out was that adding fractions is not as easy as it looks! But i am sure with time we will get the hang of it.
Little “R” has been off sick for most of the week but we were glad to see her come today! She really enjoyed the weighing scales. we used the animal maths manipulative’s to try and balance the scales. She worked out the animals that were the same, weighed the same! Not all animals that are the same colour weigh the same though…..
We made towers with our ideal blocks. These are great fun for building interesting structures. These were developed in 1967 by a Swedish Mathematician and it is a great toy for developing 3D and spatial reasoning. Personally I can spend hours with this toy!
The girls also found our new Fraction tower equivalency cubes and although they are far to young to really understand them, they did enjoy pulling them apart and pushing them back together again. I did use fraction related language with them whilst they played with them and showed them that 2 halves are the same a 1 whole.
I will have a little think over the weekend of how I can use all these toys in a more age appropriate way with the little ones.