Green Options

If your family includes a preschooler and people who aren’t preschoolers (such as yourself!), it can be challenging to find a family art activity that can equally engage the skills and creativity of each family member.

In my family, which includes two people who are preschoolers and two people who aren’t, one of our favorite family art activities is to make more creations for our little girls’ felt board. Felt is easy to cut, holds its shape well and doesn’t ravel, can be drawn on with permanent markers and glued with hot glue, and, if you work with wool felt or an acrylic felt made from recycled plastic bottles, it’s an eco-friendly craft material, as well.

Simple fun.

I have this weird thing about math, which isn’t helped by my tendency to do complicated-to-me quilt block calculations at 10 pm (A 4.5″ quilt block has a quarter-inch seam allowance on all sides. How many blocks will I need to cut to have a finished 40″x60″ quilt? I want to put a heart-shaped applique on every other quilt block on this quilt, NOT including the border blocks. How many applique hearts do I need to cut out? Yawn…).

Of course, I earned my math aversion by doing decades worth of really, really boring, irrelevant, and repetitive math worksheets in school, so that now I have difficulty doing relevant, interesting, not really that complicated math as an adult. It’s my goal, then, to keep math super-fun for my little girls. There are only so many games of Uncle Wiggly or 1-25 BINGO that an adult can play, however, so I’ve taken to DIY-ing my kids some math activities out of recycled materials. I made them an arithmetic matching game, and now I’m going to make them a fractions pizza game. Here’s how:

I still remember the day my daughter graduated from wooden peg puzzles to real puzzles with interlocking pieces. It felt like a rite of passage, as she explored the spatial relationships and put images together. My daughter’s first puzzle was the Melissa and Doug Bugs Floor Puzzle. Three years later, this puzzle is still a favorite, and the large pieces are easy for little hands. [...]

We have both the Melissa and Doug Wooden Sound Vehicle Blocks and the Melissa and Doug Wooden Farm Sound Blocks. By matching up the images on both blocks, children are positively reinforced with the corresponding sound. Just like other Melissa and Doug natural toys, the sound blocks are made of high quality wood. My daughter thinks it is funny [...]

The Guidecraft wooden ring counting toy is a great, simple math manipulative. My father bought this toy for my daughter for her very first Christmas, thus we have had our Guidecraft ring counter for five years! For this first Christmas (and everyone since!), I sent a friendly email reminder to all our family members that we did not want plastic, battery-operated toys. Some family members listened, some did not. While searching the [...]

Many theories on early childhood education promote children’s natural curiousity to discover mathematical concepts. Given manipulatives, children naturally experiment, hypothesize, and build their own theories. An abacus is a great toy for building such knowledge, and Melissa and Doug make an affordable wooden one of high quality. Many other kinds of manipulatives, like marbles, get lost around the house. I like that the counters are securely attached to the abacus making clean up an ease. On [...]