sorting apples

We got busy with some Sculpey clay and made ourselves a bunch of mini-apples.  The red and yellow clay blocks were a lot harder than the green.  Not having had a lot of experience with Sculpey, I was a little disappointed!  It made it much more difficult to make the apples - that's why there's less yellow and red ones.  I mixed together red, yellow and green bits until I got a brown I liked for the stem.

We baked them.  I love the swirl one!!!

Then we sorted, counted, arranged, improved our math skills and played!

{Thanks Roots & Wings for the idea.}

towers up!

This is a fun math game that I used to play with my kids all the time when I taught 1st and 2nd grade.  I've been wanting to do a few more math-related things with Conner this summer, and when I saw foam cubes & dice at Target in the dollar section, I knew just what to do!
(If you want to play along - you'll need a piece of graph paper, 2 dot die, and 88 little cubes)

I glued some of the cubes together into stacks of 2-3-4 and 5.  I left some of the blocks single.  For my version, I used a total of 88 cubes.  I suppose if you just want to play with regular blocks that's fine, it's just easier if the blocks are stuck together.
Then I got out the graph paper and made a bunch of squares.  I then labeled the squares with 1-2-3-4-5.

You will also need 2 dice.  I just play it with one game board, and we take turns rolling the die.  Whatever number you get is how many blocks you take away.  So - say you roll a 3 and a 5.  You can take away a tower with 5 blocks and another one with 3 blocks.  OR you can take away two towers that are 4 blocks high.  Just whatever you do, you can't take the towers apart.  The goal is to not end up with a single cube left on the board!  When you have cleared the board, you can play it in reverse by rolling the dice to get all the pieces set back up.

He was playing with a friend the other day, and it evolved into a stacking/building game when they were done counting and playing.  They came up with some interesting towers and buildings!  When they were all done, it all stores easily in a shoebox! (I can't really explain the napkin bandana.  It's his thing lately.  He's 5. whatever.)

If you have any questions about how to play, let me know - otherwise - happy counting and building!

counting outside

We were sitting out in front of our house playing with the chalk and waiting for Daddy to come home.  And the kids were just LOVING walking on the stones by the garden.  So I made a number line.  Conner could hop back and forth, adding & subtracting as he went.

What a great activity for my little kinesthetic learner!!

I figure when it washes away, we can always write the alphabet and make up some letter games to play too.  I'm just so glad we've been able to be playing outside and moving around more!!!

power solids

We had a lazy day at home today. I was excited about that, but realized I needed to pull something new out of my bag of tricks if we were going to make it through the day!
So... I went and grabbed my POWER SOLIDS off the shelf. Unfortunately, I didn't have any dry beans and didn't want to deal with the mess of rice. We'd already had a somewhat unfortunate water mess and I wasn't ready for another. So noodles it was!
We scooped, dumped, poured, measured, and had a blast! I realized I don't use terms like pyramid, cone, cylinder, and prism very often. (Do you?) So, we're going to get these out more often, play with different materials, and figure out what it all means!
At dinner when he was telling Daddy about our new toy - he said "you know the blue things Mommy used when she was a teacher?" Well for now, we're just having fun sticking noodles in the blue things - guess the names need a little more practice.