Gift Bows

Recently, I was wrapping gifts for Christmas and came across a partial bag of bows from last year.  Unfortunately, they had been crushed beyond repair while in storage.  I was going to toss them out but at the last minute decided that maybe my grand kids, who were visiting for the holidays, would like to play with them.  I put them in a basket and set them on the kitchen counter.  It didn't take long before my grandson was asking what the bows were for and could he play with them.  I didn't give him any direction at first, wanting to see where his creativity would take him.

The first thing he did was to separate all the bows into rows of each color.  I took the opportunity to talk with him about more and less.  I asked questions such as:  Which row has the most bows?  How about the least?  Are there more red or purple bows?  Which color has less, the gold or the green? (sorting, counting, graphing, color recognition, measurement, vocabulary)

After counting how many of each color was in each row, he lined them all up and counted how many there were all together.  He also attempted to count backward from 10.  He soon discovered that he had too many bows and had to keep removing them until his count down ended with no bows left.  (counting, problem solving)

 

Then I showed him the red-white pattern of a candy cane and asked him if he could make that with bows.  (patterning, problem solving)

As he was looking at his finished candy cane from the bottom, he suddenly realized that he saw a letter.  He finished it off making the letter U.  (letter recognition)

This took all of about 10 minutes, but we touched on so many math concepts.