I have several parents of students I’ve been sharing with recently about various ways for kiddos to use Duplo for learning… so I thought I would share a few ideas here that could benefit everyone!
Write letters on Duplo!
Did you know – you can write on Duplo with sharpie marker, and it can be erased with a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser or finger nail polish remover? So you can put whatever letters you’d like on blocks and kids can use them to practice reading sight words, or building even more difficult spelling words! This idea can last all the way up through elementary or middle school as a more interactive way to practice words!
You can have your child create word family/rhyming words with Duplo, too!
Build sentences and even stories!
By writing whole words on blocks, and adding punctuation, your child can start building complete sentences and even making short stories with their Duplo blocks! Have your older child help you think of words to write on the blocks – practice which words are nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, pronouns, etc… and after you write the words, your student can sort them by word types! This is also a great way to practice labeling sentence parts, etc! So many things you can do with this to meet many needs.
Add, subtract, and even multiply & divide!
Looking to use Duplo with math? Here’s an easy idea for using the dots to add, but you can also easily use Duplo to teach multiplication concepts, as well! And of course, you can always take away Duplo for math as well!! And just think – you could use it for non-standard measurement, sorting by colors or size, patterning, counting by twos, graphing, and fractions, too!
The possibilities are truly endless.
And don’t forget to let your kiddos play with Duplo to build their creativity! 🙂
ENJOY, and please – share with me any ideas you and your kiddos come up with!
I’m not going to begin to put an age level on this lesson because I’ve sort of lost all realistic memory of when is the “right time” to do this type of activity. SO, I’ll say that if you think it might be time for your child, you might be right!
Graphing is so much fun. And it’s even more fun when you add in a technology element and work with your child to set them up in Excel or Numbers! I have a Mac, so our work was done in Numbers. The first step before creating any graphs, however, is to collect data.
I came across this insect survey free on TPT and thought, somehow I have to make this work for Becca even though there isn’t a class full of kids to survey! Enter social media. I polled Facebook through my page (thanks to several friends and family members who shared my post!) and we received over 30 responses!
As I scrolled through the responses, I would read them out to Becca, and she learned about making tally marks. She would mark the sheet, and then once we had recorded all of the answers, we counted the marks and I wrote how many of each insect had been “favorited” by our participants. Making tally marks was a new experience for her, and she wanted to circle the groups of four instead of making a line through them for five to group them together. Cody and I were both there for this lesson, and we had to explain to her that this isn’t something you can do however which way you want – to make tally marks, this IS the way to do it. No other options. She wasn’t real sure about that, which I dealt with again with her when we did our second grouping of data, which I’ll talk about later in this same post.
So, once we had the numbers for our insects, I pulled up Numbers and immediately set up a little data table. She read off the insect names to me and how many of each one. Then she decided what title we should put on our table. I knew that I wanted to teach her about pie graphs AND bar graphs (she has seen some bar graphs before, but it’s been a while), so I first put the information into a pie graph, and she was immediately intrigued – she helped me select the colors that she wanted, and was very pleased. She started asking questions about what % means… and I skirted around it by simply saying, it’s what part of the whole group it is – sort of like fractions. She said “oh” and was actually content with that. No doubt percentages will be entering our math time very soon. Then I let her select whether she wanted a vertical or horizontal bar graph, and she selected the color. She decided that she needed some pictures of her top favorite insect to make it look a little “happier,” so I pulled up Google images, and had her type in “butterfly.” She selected the image and I showed her how to save it. Then she also saved a dragonfly and a ladybug. I showed her how to import her photos into the document, and once I got them the right size, she dragged them to where she wanted them. I had her tell me about her graphs and typed her words onto the “poster” as well. We printed it out on card stock, and she was so proud to show her daddy!
Left: she typed in the words to save it to my computer, and was quite frustrated wanting to know what crazy person put the letters in the wrong order on the keyboard! HA!
Then, a couple days later, we colored Easter eggs with some dear friends. And we had ALL. THESE. DANG. EGGS! What to do with them all? So after she had spent a good amount of time sticking butterfly stickers all over them, we sat down and made a tally of how many eggs we had of each color, and I had her draw a bar graph on paper so she would have the physical concept of what the bars show. We talked about how “this is what three orange eggs look like in real life, and this is what they look like in tally marks, and this is what they look like on a bar graph!” She said “that’s cool let’s put them on your computer.” Hey, what can I say? It’s really fun to make “graph posters” on Numbers! So, for ease (and because it was almost bedtime) I pulled up her previous file, renamed and saved it as a new file, and then had her tell me the new data to type in. She was quick to notice that I needed to change my titles on the data table, and told me what names I needed. Instead of types of insects, I needed colors of eggs! She decided this poster needed different graph colors, and of course it needed Easter egg images. We also edited our text, and in about 7 minutes, we had a whole new graph poster about our Easter eggs! We printed it and she was so excited again to show it off to her Daddy!
This is a super simple way to get your child talking about Science and Math AND to incorporate the Technology aspect of STEM as well. Don’t have a computer or experience with Excel/Numbers? No problem! Drawing on paper can be awesome as well – you could draw on copy paper, cut them out, and post them onto a large sheet of construction paper! Clip photos from magazines, or illustrate yourself with paints and markers!
I’ve noticed since doing these graphs, Becca is much more interested in Math again – not shying away from addition and subtraction story problems, and excited to count and sit to learn new math concepts as well. Remember – Math HAS to be FUN!!! Make it that way!
Becca is totally in love with Gertrude McFuzz. She has the app on her Kindle Fire HD Kids (find out more about it from my post here and here.) and listens to it/watches it FREQUENTLY. So much so that she pretty much has the entire story memorized, and can take Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories (aff link) and almost read Gertrude line for line. (And honestly, it’s a fabulous moral/life lesson to be engraining in her brain – if you haven’t read it, you really must!)
Another one of her recent fascinations has been fractions. I recently said something like “let me cut that in half for you,” and she said, “what’s half?” And then we had a conversation about something else that was divided into equal pieces… and then she asked about my measuring cups… and then she finally said, “You keep telling me things are fractions. Can we do them?” Hahaha. Seriously. This girl. She LOVES math! So, working from my background knowledge of introducing fractions, and combining that with the way I know her brain works, I came up with this super fun activity that she just absolutely LOVED!
(Get your FREE PRINTABLE HERE!) Please note – the photos the front cover of my printable are just google search images.
The photo of Gertrude used for the feather pages was snapped by my camera from the book.
Can be printed in color or b/w.
So here’s how it works – print the sheets on card stock – so the glue won’t mess up your paper. Then, get some feathers (Becca knew we were doing Gertrude when we bought the feathers, so she selected the blue/green/yellow pack because Gertrude’s feathers are those colors in the story – you could use any colors). A great way to introduce the concept of fractions is to talk about what the top number and bottom number mean. You don’t have to call them numerator and denominator, but you can if you want to. For Becca, I started with the bottom number. The bottom number is the total number of feathers we need to glue on. Then, the top number tells us how many special feathers we need to pick of the same color.
She didn’t want to mix the colors up, but you could obviously easily have 2/5 be one color, and the other three be other colors, etc. We glued them on to Gertrude, and let the pages dry. Then, we went back and talked about the fractions, and she told me what color feathers matched with the fraction. I wrote the color word on the line for her. Then, we made them into a book just by punching holes and tying ribbon through the holes. You could easily laminate them and put them in a ring binder, but she loves to feel the feathers. I know that it won’t last forever, but it was a super fun project, and every time we read her book, it’s fabulous fraction practice all over again!
Like this activity? Please share it with others! You can also share my Facebook page with others – I share activities like these regularly – not only from my own blog, but also from other bloggers. And, each day at noon, I share a new must-have book to add to your personal library! Coming up this next month, March is all about “real” books – you won’t want to miss these fabulous non-fiction finds for ALL ages of kids!
(aff link) and almost read Gertrude line for line. (And honestly, it’s a fabulous moral/life lesson to be engraining in her brain – if you haven’t read it, you really must!)
Butterbees and Bumbleflies 