Play By Nature: Money, Dice and Catapults

Hope all my Canadian friends enjoyed the Family Day long weekend this week! We spent the weekend with K, T and Ky's Bella and Poppa and Auntie C and Uncle E just relaxing and enjoying each others company.

This week K seemed to be quite focused on developing his math skills. He took out his money that he has been saving and wanted to know how much he had. He sorted out the coins by type while I got out his 100's board. He put a penny in each spot until he had all 100 spaces filled. We emptied the board and he counted out the remaining 42 pennies on the board. Next we moved onto the nickles. I helped him place the first 3 (on the 5, 10 and 15 spaces) then he was able to easily figure out the pattern and place the remaining nickles (exactly $1.00!) We practiced counting by 5's up to 100. K was able to figure out where to put the dimes without any help from me, and easily counted to 100 by tens. Once he had counted all the coins he added them up and got a grand total of $2.72. (Math)

(Later he was able to take it to the store where he picked out something to spend it on, and count out how much he owed at the counter.)

K made up a game while playing with T, Ky and I this week using stones and dice. We took turns rolling 2 dice, adding up the numbers and counting out the same number of stones and putting them into a pile. Once the stones had been piled up K counted out the number of stones in his pile. (Math)

K watched an episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy this week. It was about Simple Machines (i.e. Levers and Pulleys) This sparked an interest in creating catapults. He started out by using a spoon at the edge of the table (after dinner) and using various projectiles. The next morning I gathered a few different levers, and projectiles and K set about experimenting. He tested to see which levers launched which projectiles the furthest. (Science)