Life's little math lessons...

I'm always looking for "busy" activities for my kids to do by themselves so I can do things like shower without a fight ensuing. There is nothing worse than being in the shower and hearing your kids fighting in another room.

The activity I made up yesterday promoted math skills, matching skills, and playing skills. The kids liked it, I liked it, and it kept them busy for the ten minutes I needed.

Pull out the blocks or legos.
Tell the kids to divide them up by color and then count each color.
When you get back to the room, have them report the number of each color to you.

When I got back I was told there were 16 red blocks. That was as far as they got before they decided to build castles and cities.

To make it a little more math worthy, I took the yellow blocks and we did some adding and subtracting with them.

Example: Place a line of 6 blocks together, take away 3 and asked how many are left.  I asked: 6 blocks minus 3 blocks equals how many? They count what is left and answer.

Take Ten!