February 6, 2011

  • Math Naturally

     

    Friday night a creative bug hit the house and all of us were doing various things. You can see what was created in this post.  One of the creations was this drawing done by Emi.



    It is a house that has a path leading up to it and there is a person walking up that path to the house. If you look closely you will see that there is a pattern in the path.  Red, blue, red, blue etc. When she showed me the picture and was telling me about it she said “See my pattern mom?” I had seen it, it was the first thing I noticed because patterns are something that she has recently begun to notice and create in her play.

    I have watched her pattern play develop naturally out of her  fascination with putting things into groups.  I first saw the grouping happen when she had a bag of skittles. She was about 4 maybe and she dumped the entire bag out on the table and grouped them together by color. I don’t recall if we ever talked about groups before that day. I do know we had never sat down at the table with work sheets to learn about putting things into groups.  One day, after  I gave her a jar of seashells I found her in our room seperating them into like groups.  I have seen her do this with blocks, beads and other colored candies. It is just something she does and it is fun for her. She has no idea that it is math and I haven’t told her that it is. That doesn’t mean that it won’t come up and that I won’t give this as an example of math at a later date...maybe. I just don’t see a need to tell her right now that it is anything other than something she likes to do.