Of all the math skills that children will acquire, counting is one that most children will already be doing before they reach school-age. Rote counting (or saying numbers in a sequence from memory) is what most children will be able to do, but this does not mean that they can actually determine the amount in a collection.

In order to help our students develop an actual understanding of numbers and how counting relates to real life, we did a counting activity with sections of a kite aimed at developing their one-to-one correspondence.

By placing pieces of a kite into a numbered order (counting as they did so), participants were able to make a connection between the spoken numeral and a concrete amount.

When young children categorize items by number, they are beginning to perceive the relationships between them.

As they evolve in their ability to recognize and count the written numeral, they start to understand how they work together.

In this activity, your budding mathematician learned how to recognize and count kite bows within the scope of our Weather theme.

Using cut-outs and pictures of kites, students placed these items into four different kites, counting and naming the numbers while doing so.

Color is such an everyday phenomenon that we don’t usually give it a lot of thought. But colors can produce surprising effects, for example, in the way they mix together.

The science behind this offers several opportunities for exploration among young students. For this experiment, we created suns while combining colors.

Using red paint, yellow paint, and orange paint, we swirled around the different colors, seeing what would happen! This helped strengthened your little one’s analytical prediction making skills.

For this activity, we used gold styrofoam cups and triangular blocks to create our very own suns.

Given the different shapes that these two items come in, they were the perfect tool for hands-on learning about basic math concepts: shape, size, area, geometry, measurement, and equivalencies.

While playing with the blocks, your child naturally began to sort them by a particular attribute, such as shape and size.

He may have noticed that the gold cups would make a perfect center, or that the triangular blocks would make the perfect sun rays. This exploration into the nature of shapes prepares your child for later geometric understanding.

Air may not seem like anything at all; in fact, we look right through it all the time, but during a windstorm, air really makes its presence known. Wind is able to lift roofs off buildings, blow down power lines and trees, and cause highway accidents as gusts push around cars and trucks.

Wind is moving air and is caused by differences in air pressure within our atmosphere. Air under high pressure moves toward areas of low pressure. The greater the difference in pressure, the faster the air flows. To help illustrate this concept, we created our very own pinwheels.

Students first painted small paper plates, and then spun them around a straw, watching as the pinwheel moved with the variations in air pressure (provided by them). This enabled your little one to understand the abstract concept of wind and air pressure.