Age 6 · Numbers, Shapes and Thinking · 11 activities
Numbers, Shapes and Thinking activities for 6 year olds
Eleven activities for the age where one thing starts standing in for another: a bundle for ten beans, a drawing on squared paper for two metres of floor.
Six is the year a child will let one thing stand for another and then work on the stand-in. Ten beans get banded into a bundle, the bundle goes in the pile of tens, and from then on it is treated as ten without being counted again. That trade is the whole of Place Value Bead Bank Game and of Bead Chain Addition Snake, where a line of short bars gets counted off in tens until the snake is nothing but ten-bars. Watch for the moment the counting stops going back to one.
The same move happens in space. Maze Blueprint Mapping has a maze of masking tape on the floor and the same maze on a sheet of squared paper, and the six year old work is holding both at once: change the plan, change the floor. It is the longest thing on this shelf and the one most likely to still be going an hour later. The sub-shelves it draws on are Counting and Quantity, Shapes, Space and Geometry and Patterns, Sequencing and Logic.
Several of these are long. The bank game, the addition snake and the maze all run twenty minutes or more, and Plant Care and Growth Measuring is five minutes a morning for weeks, which is a different kind of long. If tonight has ten minutes in it, take Paper Folding Precision Challenge: a square of paper, a hard crease, and four attempts left on the table in the order they were made.
The eleven at six
Ordered by the age each one suits best, youngest first. The list is built from each activity's whole age range rather than its single best year, so all eleven suit a six year old: the early ones arrived at three or four and get asked harder questions here, and the last of them runs on to nine.
- Shape Shadow Match Your child stands a solid shape in a beam of light and works out which of the outlines traced on the paper its shadow belongs to. 2 min · 10 to 20 min · household only
- Story Sequence Cards Your child puts four or five cards into the order the thing actually happened, and then tells you the story they make. 2 min · 5 to 10 min · household only
- Weighted Pod Sorting Your child picks up two pots that look exactly alike, decides which one is heavier, and keeps going until all ten are in pairs. 15 min, once · 5 to 10 min · household only
- Clock Face and Hands Match Your child sets the hands on a paper clock to match a card, and the card says what happens at that time in his own day. 15 min, once · 10 to 20 min · household only
- Continent Map Puzzle Your child lifts each continent out of a wooden map by its knob and puts it back where it came from. 1 min · 10 to 20 min · has to be bought
- Paper Folding Precision Challenge Your child folds a square of paper corner to corner, presses the crease with a thumbnail, and finds out four folds later whether the first one was straight. no setup · 10 to 20 min · household only
- Place Value Bead Bank Game Your child is sent to the bank for a number, comes back with loose beans, bundles of ten and bags of a hundred, and trades ten of anything for one of the next size up. 2 min · 20 min or more · household, or a bought set
- Bead Chain Addition Snake Your child lays a line of bead bars, counts off the first ten beads, swaps them for a single ten-bar, and keeps going until the snake is nothing but tens. 2 min · 20 min or more · household, or a bought set
- Maze Blueprint Mapping Your child tapes a maze onto the floor and then draws it on paper as a plan, or draws the plan first and builds to it. 2 min · 20 min or more · household only
- Plant Care and Growth Measuring Your child grows a bean from a dried one in the cupboard, waters it on a schedule that is hers, and cuts a paper strip to its height every morning. 2 min · 5 min a day, for weeks · household only
- Cardboard Loom Yarn Weaving Your child weaves a small square of cloth on a loom cut from a cereal box, over four or five sittings, and it takes as long as it takes. 15 min, once · 20 min or more · household only
Nearly all of it is beans, tape, squared paper and a cereal box. Two work better with a bought bead set, and both say so on their line and again at the top of their own page.