While I usually tutor four afternoons / evenings a week, I took this week off and it’s been lovely. More than anything, it’s allowed Grae and I some quality time at home in the afternoons, which has been really nice. As a result, we’ve been doing all sorts of fun little spur of the moment activities and projects, which is exactly what this broken hearts number matching activity is.
After seeing what a hit our recent play dough subtraction smash activity was, I immediately starting thinking of other fun, hands-on activities I could provide Miss G with to foster her love of exploring numbers {and subtraction in particular}. I’m fairly certain the play dough activity was so well-liked because of the smashing aspect, so I wanted something just as unique and fun. Simply taking manipulatives away from a pile was not going to cut it. {Well, not for me at least.} I racked my brain for interesting ways to take things away, until I thought of eating! G loves all sorts of healthy foods and is pretty much constantly hungry currently {hello, growth spurt!}, so snack subtraction of some sort was a perfect fit.
Early this morning Miss G asked me if we could play an adding game {the girl loves addition currently}. Not having anything prepared, I quickly scanned the room for something that could be turned into a math game without much fuss. Our ever-growing LEGO collection caught my attention first and I knew it had potential. I grabbed several bricks as well as a couple of just-purchased wooden dice {in coordinating colours, obviously ☺}. I figured we could use the dice to generate our addition questions and the LEGO bricks as counters, then added in the plastic serving tray just to give the game a defined playing area and surface.