Area Tiles

Ryan has a cool math puzzle from The Puzzle Man.  I love it’s big wooden pieces, but every time we have played with it I noticed some kinks. So, of course I decided to create my own ‘slightly modified’ version.

I recreated the pieces using foam sheets. I wrote the numbers on both side of each piece to make it easier for Ryan to use them without mastering spatial reasoning skills of flipping pieces in a very specific way. And, I made three sets so we had more options for activities.

Ryan enjoyed seeing how many ways we could make 10 (obviously, these aren’t all of the ways). In case you’re missing the point- all of the 10 blocks that we created were the same size. When doing it together we laid them on top of one another to check that.

The puzzle can be used for addition and subtraction. I would give Ryan a few pieces and say what do we have to add to six to get ten. It can also be a great self checking tool for simple addition and subtraction problems.

Of course, I’m posting the template (page 1 and page 2) for you!

Let me know how you use the area tiles!

Fun with Color Tiles

At the beginning of the school year I purchased the Saxon Homeschool Manipulative Kit to go with our math curriculum. We use the manipulatives nearly everyday, even though we only do the Saxon K lessons a few times a week.

I was very excited to see an activity using color tiles on Joyful Learner!
I started to make the cards for the activity and realized that tracing the tiles was super annoying! So, I decided to use the computer instead so that I could share my hard work with you! Here is the link for the tile template. I slid our copy into a page protector so that we can do this activity a few different times. When I'm ready to make more I'm going to try using one of tiles as a stamp! Ryan was good at estimating how many tiles each shape would take. This was a great activity to teach him that an estimation is just that, and you can change your prediction as you work.
As you can see Ella is getting more into 'tot school'. For her I placed red and yellow color tiles in a simple AB pattern. She really enjoyed putting the matching bears onto their spots! I tried to encourage her to work from left to right. She wasn't having it, and that's ok :)

Do you have ideas of other activities to do with our color tiles?

Here are more awesome Math Links from Joyful Learner: