August 2021
Welcome to EFM's August Newsletter!
Miscellaneous News
We are pleased to announce receiving a gift of $1000 from a generous anonymous supporter of Early Family Math. That supporter also connected us with some volunteer translators. Early Family Math is a collaboration of people who feel passionately about early math education and we very much appreciate the support we have received from many people and organizations!
In other news ...
New translations now available: Spanish for Chapters 1, 2, and 3, and Dutch for Chapter 2.
EFM has been selected to do a virtual presentation at the 2021 mEducation Alliance Symposium. If you would like to watch the recorded video presentation, you can find it on the Early Family Math YouTube channel.
New Activities to Enjoy!
The theme this month is making variations of an activity to extend it to multi-level versions. Suppose you and your child are enjoying a particular activity. Either of you can challenge the other by suggesting that this activity now needs to be done standing on one foot. Okay, I'm kidding about the one foot; however, in the examples that follow you will see ways that a beginning activity can be changed in fun and interesting ways. Creating their own version of an activity can be a lot of fun for a child and can greatly increase their enthusiasm!
Chapters 1 – 5 – Shapes on the Floor
This starts as a simple Chapter 1 shape identification activity. Cut out large shapes from big pieces of paper (use color paper if you have it) and place the shapes on the floor. At first, the shapes will be a triangle, a rectangle, a square, a pentagon, a hexagon, and an octagon - you can find patterns for these online or in the EFM Printables file - don't fret about making them perfectly. For more running around, include more than one of each shape. As your child gets better at this, include variations of these shapes - include a right triangle, an obtuse triangle, an acute triangle, a kite, a parallelogram (diamond), and some more unusual shapes.
Do the activity by giving your child some shape information and challenge them to run to the shape, or shapes, that satisfy that information. For a very young child, you might simply show them a drawing and challenge them to find the matching shape on the floor, and maybe name it when they do. For a slightly older child, you could name the shape and challenge them to find it.
Let's add some new aspects to this. You could ask for shapes all of whose sides are the same length. Or for shapes all of whose angles are the same (or all different). Or shapes whose opposite sides (or angles) are the same size. As your child gets more confident, you can playfully mix in some impossible requests such as a triangle with two right angles or a quadrilateral with exactly three right angles.
For older children still, you can start talking about the size of angles. For example, find shapes that have an angle bigger than 90 degrees, or find a triangle all of whose angles are less than 90 degrees.
One variation that is useful in a lot of activities is to reverse your roles - have your child make up questions and you must find the shapes. You might even make a "mistake" sometimes and have your child explain to you what you did wrong.
Chapters 2 – 4 – Points for Baskets
This starts as a basic counting activity for Chapter 2. Find a moderate size container, perhaps a clean trash basket or an empty flower pot. Find some objects to throw into it. These can be wadded up pieces of paper, junk mail, or perhaps some soft toys. Position the container far enough away so that tossing the objects into the container is a fun challenge, but is not too hard.
For the Chapter 2 version of this game, let the limit of your child's counting determine how many objects are thrown. As a solo activity, challenge your child to get as many baskets as possible - each time a basket is made, update out loud the current total. Make this into a multi-person game by taking turns, counting each other's baskets as they are made, and then comparing scores at the end. For a child not comfortable with numerals, place a dot on a line on paper to record each basket - the person with the longer line of dots wins.
There are many variations possible from this simple start.
To practice number bonds, use a fixed number of objects, say 10. After all 10 objects are tossed and the number that went in counted, ask how many throws were missed. For example, 10 objects are thrown and 6 baskets were made, then 4 throws were missed.
To practice skip counting, assign more than one point to a basket. That way each basket will move along the skip count sequence. You can make this even more involved by having more than one target container and assigning different numbers of points to the containers. Now you are practicing skip counting and adding. You can also use this scenario with some unusual numbers, say 4 points and 7 points. Have your child discover which scores can occur. Pick an impossible score, such as 10 in this example, and have your child figure out how to get as close as possible to it
Practice single-digit or double-digit addition by keeping track of the scores and adding up the scores from all the rounds.
Chapter 4 – 6 – Factor Triangles (from Nrich)
Form a simple triangle that has a circle at each corner and a square in the middle of each side. The product of each pair of corners should be the value in the square that connects those corners. These puzzles provide basic multiplication practice if you fill in the circles and ask what should go in the squares. They become trickier if you fill in some or all of the squares and leave empty some or all of the circles.
If you fill in two squares, then the circle between them must evenly divide both of them. That is, that circle is a common divisor of the two numbers. Challenge your child to find the three circle values when they are only given the three square values. After they have become good at that and can explain it to you, challenge them to figure out whether it is always possible to find circle values given any three square values - if so, can they find a general method for doing this? - if not, what are some examples?
To make more complicated puzzles of this type, see the "Island Hopping with Products" puzzles in Chapter 5.
If you have any questions or comments, please send them my way. I would enjoy the opportunity to chat with you. Also, if you are interested in collaborating with us or supporting us in any fashion, I would love to talk with you about ways we can work together.
- Chris Wright
August 18, 2021
chris@kitchentablemath.com