If getting dinner ready in your household is anything like ours, the last thing you probably have time to do is to nurture your child’s curiosity for the world, help them explore patterns, shapes and numbers and have some quality bonding time. However, the following activities do exactly that
and are not onerous, time consuming or difficult. Here are a few ideas, similar to the
breakfast and
lunch activities, of simple activities that you can do with your preschooler at dinner time. All can be done with a baby on your hip, whilst feeding the dog, cutting up dinner into the right size for little mouths and sewing on nametags to togs for swimming lessons tomorrow – or is that just evenings at our house!?
Firstly, is Friday night pizza night for you family? It’s now also counting night! Get your child to work out how many pieces of pizza your family has eaten. For example, Sarah’s had two pieces, and John’s had three, Dad’s had five and Uncle Tim’s had six, so all up we’ve eaten 16 pieces of pizza! Have them actually count them if they are having trouble, or else counting on their fingers at this stage is fine. Perhaps everyone could keep his/ her crusts, and your child could count them up? There are many other things your child can count too. How many pieces are leftovers (which Uncle Tim will probably have for breakfast tomorrow morning)? How many boxes did it come in? How many partly eaten pieces are there? How many different types of pizza were there? See what other categories you can come up with – challenge your child to think of a new thing to count each week!
The second dinner activity gets your children to play with their food (not necessarily great), but hopefully will get them to eat their veggies (great)! One night when you have mixed veggies, either frozen or fresh, serve them to you children with the veggies all mixed up. The next step is to get you children to sort them back into the separate groups. By sorting mixed veggies into piles of carrot, peas, corn and cauliflower your child is learning to group and discriminate. After a few nights, try changing the groups. Get them to group the veggies by colour (green, orange, red, white, yellow ) , or by shape (sphere-ish(peas, corn) , cylinder (cut carrot, zucchini, beans) , cube (cut potato, capsicum), tree shaped (broccoli, cauliflower). The ability to sort items into groups by their similarities and differences is a fundamental mathematical and scientific skill. With any luck, your kids will be keen to eat their veggies after they’ve sorted them too!
Thirdly, shape spotting. Get your preschooler to see how many different shapes s/he can see on the table. The list is endless – once you start looking at the dinner table in terms of shapes you won’t believe you didn’t see them there before. Cups, plates, serving dishes, cutlery, food, placemats are all shapes than can be named and described. Some things are a combination of shapes (like a divided feeding plate might have squares and rectangles). Look at the pattern on the plates – what shapes are on there? Once you start looking for, naming and describing shapes, you’ll find yourself doing in even when your preschooler isn’t with you!
These activities have been designed to bring maths into your everyday lives in a simple, no fuss way. Many people don’t realise how many stress free ways there are to learn about maths with your children. Maths is so much more than times tables and bookwork, but this is still how most people see it. Hopefully, by bringing these simple ideas into your everyday activities you will be able to make maths easier for your child, with minimum stress and maximum enjoyment.
(October 2007) (
