You cannot say that math stinks at Harmony's House! We have been using the pumpkin spice rice to develop math concepts here at school for the last two weeks. Some of our learning objectives have been to explore volume with measuring cups, funnels, and bottles.
Some friends worked around the Explore Table for an additional 15-20 minutes following the introduction in Small Group Time. It was fascinating to pour rice from one container into the other.
Sometimes our Small Group work was to find shapes hidden in our rice. Then we sorted them by color, yellow or red. This was so exciting to unearth the hidden objects and practice saying shape and color names!
The last day we had counting bears hidden in the rice! The challenge after finding the bears was to organize them into families: "red bear families" or "small bear families" etc.
The children had to look closely at the bears' sizes because the medium and big bears look similar at first glance. We had lots of conversations about size during this activity.
Most of our friends made bear families according to color, but some organized the bear family by color and size order as well.
Then everything got dumped back into the Explore Table for further play for anyone who wanted to continue this work during Work Time.
