math.mama

🎉They say never reveal your true age, but how could I resist? 😁

🎉I'm absolutely in love with my math cake

🎉I am 2021 - 1987

🎉Hubby designed this!

🎉I'm impressed!

Who is she?

Ada Lovelace was a countess after her marriage, but she preferred to describe herself as an analyst and a metaphysician.

Known as the enchantress of numbers and the world’s first computer programmer. Pretty impressive, hey?

Her notes include an algorithm showing how to calculate a sequence of numbers, which forms the basis for the design of the modern computer.

Hats off to you, Ada!

🥛How many cups?

💡It's great to show children different ways to solve the same problem and encourage them to come up with their own ways to solve them.

😁The more strategies and approaches that students are exposed to, the deeper their own conceptual understanding of the topic becomes.

LEAF PUZZLES

🌱This took literally 1 minute to set up. Find some leaves and cut them up. Get your child to piece them back together.

🌿You can try using spatial language while playing such as “turn, beside, above, below, between, next to, to the right, to the left, etc.”

🍂When working on a puzzle, if your child gets stuck you can offer two different pieces, one that will fit, and one that won’t.

🍁Ask them to guess which of the two pieces will fit just by looking and to test/explain their choice afterwards.

🍃You can create more pieces for more challenge. Also, painting the leaves different colours may help younger children who are still working on these skills.

Who is crafting this weekend?

Check out our chocolate holders which we used to do lots of counting with.

2 long ears
2 rounds eyes
1 button nose
6 whiskers

Have a lovely Easter break 🐰❤️🐣

🌞It's getting warmer and spring is nearly amongst us.

❄️We enjoyed the last bit of snow and used our winter themed cards by to write numbers in the snow.

✨Of course, writing with pencil and paper is an essential skill and super important, but writing numbers in other media (like flour, sugar, mud, snow etc) can help children learn to write them correctly.

❤️Plus it's so much fun!

🎲What's your favourite number?

DICE

🎲 and we are looking at dice.

🎲Ever since childhood I've familiarised myself with dice whilst playing boardgames.

🎲I used to collect them, some children had coins jingling in their pockets, but I stuffed my pockets with multicoloured dice😂

🎲I'm looking at nets today.

🎣Not fishing nets!

💠These nets are 2D and can be folded up to make a solid.

🤔A cube can have various nets. Try drawing or making a few. Do they join up to make a cube?

❤️Dice have special nets, the opposite faces add up to 7.

🌻We used post it notes and sunflower seeds to imagine possible nets.

🎲Try the dice net challenge for further practice

https://www.transum.org/software/SW/Starter_of_the_day/Students/Hot/Dice_Numbers.asp

🎲So many good ideas using dice on my stories today

Some simple snow day math activities❄️❄️❄️

💰It's money week with and

👛Playing shop (amongst a few others) is one of our ultimate favourite ways to have fun and learn money sense. We made things super yummy by creating our own ice cream shop.

🍨 Children can design their own ice-cream by selecting a range of toppings, adding up the total cost for the ice-cream and paying for it. Children can also practice subtraction by calculating the change for each ice-cream purchase. For artistic children, an ice-cream shop is also a wonderful opportunity to get out bright colours and invent different ice cream designs and flavours.

✏️I recently did a write up for on learning maths with money.

↖️The link to my blog post is in my bio. It's literally bursting at the seams with ideas and mention of Middle Eastern Bazaars😂. I hope you enjoy these simple ways I explored and introduced money-related maths learning activities to my son’s playtime.

❄️I just love snowflakes and snow generally.

❄️A 2D shape is symmetrical of a line can be drawn through it and either side is a reflection of the other (they look the same). The line is called a line of symmetry (or mirror line).

❄️We took our decorative snowflake outside and used a skewer to show the line of symmetry. We found 3 initially but there are actually 6! Can you find them all?

picked snow for . Follow along for some snowfabulous ideas!

PLAYDOUGH

has done a few posts on simple counting board books for children. It's really inspired me to get some of our books out and practice counting.

🐰Here is one of our favourites, Peter Rabbit and Friends which was a present from Curious K's auntie and uncle.

🐇We used playdough cutters to bring the characters to life.

🐰We cut out 4 rabbits to match the book illustrations

🌻We used our sunflower playdough mat template from to practice counting down.

✨We added some wooden numbers to match the amount of pumpkin seeds as we counted down from 5 to 0 (we couldn't find sunflower seeds 😉)

🚀When children count backwards they can think “10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0!” as if a rocket were to take off into space.

🧠These kind of mats are great to use because they help children build understanding of what is actually happening.

🌻As we subtract one seed each time, children can see the subtraction happening by using such hands-on materials.