Math Attack! - Making Sense of Weird Words

I don't know about you but numbers scare me. So I've not been teaching her anything math related because I have no idea how to start or what to do. But starting somewhere is always good, and this was a gentle introduction for the both of us :)

It all began when we were making pancakes one day and I realised that some words we (adults) use mean absolutely nothing to kids. Like "half" for example. What in the world is a "half"? And making that hand gensture of slicing the air in front of you doesn't quite explain it either.

And with that, we entered our math journey with fractions.

I figured that a visual presentation would work best for such a topic, so I quickly drew out some circles and cut out some shapes to fit. Most times, I prepare for our sessions while Poppy is in school, but since this was a spur of the moment thing, she was watching as I was drawing and cutting. So that got her excited too.

"What are you doing, Mama? Can I help too?" :)

The whole activity went really smoothly and we managed to cover everything rather quickly. Then Poppy came up with a little game. We'd take turns handing each other the shapes and then guessing what they were, like "This is a ..... third!". Then we upped it up a notch by having to place the correct shape in its respective 'home'.

I just love how we are able to go with the flow :)

Another word that makes absolutely no sense to kids is "estimate". How does one explain it? Telling them "agak-agak" simply wouldn't help. So I brought out 3 glass jars with nuts, bottle caps and pasta shapes respectively, and asked Poppy to guess how many of each item she thought was in each glass jar. And after, she counted the items. Ooooo the anticipation!

At first she'd guess crazy amounts like 600 or 100,000 (no I don't have that many bottle caps in my house!) but after she understood, she began to get really good at estimating. 

We enjoyed it so much that we did another round with pompoms and plastic animals. I love this activity; it's such an easy thing to do (we did it over dinner!) and it feels more like a fun activity rather than a 'lesson'. Yay!