Valentine’s Day is a holiday that involves expressing feelings from your heart, but that does not mean you cannot integrate some mental math into your activities while you’re at it. With all the cards, candy, and heart-shaped items, you have plenty to work from to make your Valentine’s Day filled with math and science! Here are some ideas you can work on to make your February 14th a day filled with some extra love for arithmetic:
Photo by Johntex, ©2007 Some rights reserved. Licensed by Creative Commons Public Works License
Symmetrical hearts: Valentine’s Day is a very geometrical holiday. Our Blasters put so much time into thinking about what shapes they are planning to make their cards to friends look like, there are hearts everywhere. It is pretty difficult to go an entire February without your child needing to use their geometry knowledge. Now is the perfect time to teach your kid about symmetry. Use a folded sheet of paper to help them make heart-shaped cards that will look neat to share with their friends. Once they have perfected their paper hearts, let them move on to trickier shapes like stars!
Heartbeats: Give your child a lesson in health by having them test their heartbeats! Make them get a timer for 60 seconds and count how many times their heart beats in a minute. For some of the older kids, you can take this a step further. Turn this into a fun exercise in multiplication. Have them calculate how many times their heart beats every 10 minutes. If they feel comfortable with that, have them see if they can find out how often their heart would beat in an hour and a day!
Hearts in a jar: Estimation and volume are huge skills that your Blaster needs to develop for any problem solving they will encounter. Get a jar (or any type of closed see-through container) and fill it up with sweethearts. Let your children guess how many hearts you put in the jar. Give them a lot of time to think about their final answer and ask them questions that can guide them to guessing an accurate number. For example, you can ask them how many hearts they can see at the base of the jar.
With these tips on mixing math into your February festivities, head over to the JumpStart blog for a guide on throwing a Valentine’s Day party for your children and their friends. And if you’re looking for more ways to keep your child active with their math, make sure they stop in at the Math Academy on Math Blaster!
from crafts « WordPress.com Tag Feed http://ift.tt/1Dt9PZ0
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment