So we used to play this game which started when we got out some lego out at the library and the 5 kids were more interested in the computer and were peeved off that I didn’t get the star wars lego. So I sat there sorting the colours into piles, lego looks so like lollies, and what do you know… then they started to be interested, after all it was beautiful! Then we had beautiful piles of different colours so I said the challenge was to choose a colour and make a monster with that colour ONLY AND you had to use the WHOLE pile and we ended up with a beautiful army of coloured monsters.
This morning Helena got up and the bucket of duplo was in the lounge from us making car ramps the day before and she decided to repeat the game and started sorting. “Would it work with duplo?” Then she had beautiful piles of colour, of course we had to estimate the biggest… then you have to check, and then you can’t help finding out if you are right and in the process of counting you get better at estimating! Brilliant.
So counting started off hard then Helena started skip counting in 2s and making piles of 10. Skip counting in 10 and using place value. We even named the colours – eg. light blue, musty blue and royal blue…
“ooo once we have done the towers lets add them all together and see if there is more than 100”. Yay…. and she liked the abacus! It took us several goes, it takes a while to get the coordination of the exchanging – 354
Of course we had to make a lovely graph – at this point Helena lost a bit of interest until there was the colouring in!! She told me the labels for the axis – you never know what they work out. Now the graph is stuck on to the bucket of duplo by a myriad of stickers. Dad and I had watched a maths comedian (possibly stand up maths) talking about Ziphs law so I think I’ll have to try a relative % graph and a cumulative graph just to see… (maybe when Helena is busy) Sample size of ONE though. I wonder what other peoples duplo colour make up is?
Of course this took alllllll day… because the yellow duplo had to be a bird first and then the game (“the little people and the yellow bird”) had to be finished, and it went all over -outside, inside, up a tree before it could be busted to be counted… oh and the towers had to be made interspersed with other projects.
homeschoolery 