Math and Art Materials

When my son was young, he made up a game of taking plastic cups and placing one on each of the kitchen floor tiles. 

His play often involved organizing materials too - lining up sidewalk chalk on the driveway, talking aloud about his sorting process as he made lines of toy animals.

A friend pointed out the mathematical thinking involved in these activities, noting that the cups on the floor were a good practice in one to one correspondence, an important early math skill that would help with counting. 

Figuring out to place one cup on one tile is a predecessor to knowing that when counting each item is one count.  This way of looking at children's play really opened my eyes to the art and math connections in young children's exploration of materials.

Well into the early elementary grades, manipulative are a big part of a math curriculum, allowing children to practice addition, subtraction and creating patterns by using objects to count out the numbers.  Even before children enter school, opportunities to explore, sort and create patterns with materials help to develop early math and numeracy skills.

Children can practice sorting by size, color or other attributes.  Begin making simple patterns with alternating colors or sizes.  Take turns with your child or encourage children to work together to start a pattern and see if the other can recognize the pattern and continue it.  It is a great social skills connection too; taking turns makes a pattern - your turn, my turn.

Materials are also a great way to learn about relative size, sort crayon bits or chalk pieces tallest to shortest or find plastic caps that fit inside one another, how many different sizes can you find?  Families can create simple mosaics with paper or cardboard shapes or recycled plastic tops. 

Have children draw a design with lines - then guess how many pieces will be needed to fill each line - check your guess.  This is great practice for learning about measurement later on.

Tracing shapes of objects will help kids to understand spatial relationships and to begin to see connections to how lines connect to make shapes.  Cut some thin strips of paper or lengths of string and explore creating shapes by connecting lines. 

This is a good introduction to geometry as well as noticing different kinds of lines - horizontal, vertical, diagonal, curved that will become the building blocks of writing letters and numbers.

Shapes, lines and patterns are important visual elements of our everyday environment.  Clothing, architecture and grocery stores are great places to notice shapes, lines and patterns.  Kids really enjoy patterns and finding connections to ideas in the world.