Scientist/Mathematician
Many traditional ways of teaching and learning are easily accessed by the Scientist/Mathematician child. Even so, you can extend what your child is doing at school, and support your child to branch into less favored areas with these activities & resources.
- Shop ‘til you Drop: Draw on your child’s logical way of thinking and ask her to organize your shopping list by area of the grocery store. Have her make a list of fruits by least to greatest weights. Ask her to figure out how much two pounds of something might be, or which is the least expensive, based on the unit price.
- Wacky Wednesday: Take a photo of your child’s room with things out of place (e.g., tie a shoe from the ceiling). You can also go to a website like http://www.kerpoof.com/ and make a picture with many silly or illogical elements. Can your child find all the out-of-place items?
- Inventor’s box: Before you toss those old electronics, take interesting looking pieces (e.g., old phone cords, keyboards, etc.) and put them in a box. Let your child use these parts to create inventions!
- Store: Invite your child to set up a pretend store and go shopping…make everything cost a nickel, or a quarter. As your child’s skill increases, see if they can give you correct change for any combination of prices/items.
- Become a citizen scientist: Observe the locations of squirrels around your community. Whether or not you find any, you can submit your data to Project Squirrel and influence scientific findings! http://projectsquirrel.org/index.shtml
- Online resources:
- Dino Logic: Let your child loose with these logic/comprehension questions: http://www.ictgames.com/tellAtRex_v3.html
- Have fun keeping the ball in the air using physics: http://www.flabbyphysics.com/.
- Monster Bus: Choose your monster avatar and collect aliens in groups of 10 for your school bus: http://mathsnacks.org/media/swf/MonsterBus.swf
- Enhance your child’s sense of wonder: http://wonderopolis.org/
- Learn more about acids and bases as you foster inference and deduction skills: http://sv.berkeley.edu/showcase/flash/juicebar.html
- Johnnie’s Math Page: Interactive math tools divided up by topic. Lots of fun activities! http://jmathpage.com/
- Photos Puzzler app: Fun app that lets you create 3 different kinds of puzzles in up to 5 different numbers of pieces with photos from your iPad, Phone, or Touch. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photos-puzzler/id405851850?mt=8 Develops problem solving and thinking skills.
- TES iboard: I love that each game gives you explicit reasoning behind it and describes the skills targeted: http://www.iboard.co.uk/curriculum.htm#maths-year2numstrategy_yearyear1 http://www.gameclassroom.com/math-games
- Simple Machines: Children this age love to figure out how things work, which supports their problem solving skills, and builds their schema. Try these fun interactives to help your child better understand simple machines and how they work: http://www.msichicago.org/fileadmin/Activities/Games/simple_machines/index.php and http://www.edheads.org/activities/simple-machines/frame_loader.htm
- What about this super simple but super creative game where kids use a single line to create a “course” for their rider, drawing on cause and effect, logic, and reasoning as well: http://www.ablestable.com/play/flash/linerider/index.htm.
