I enjoy spending time with my grandchildren and I look for ways to engage them in activities that promote their math and literacy skills. In anticipation of our days summer days together, I made a trip to the dollar store for materials to build with. I came home with a variety of sticks (long, short etc., some modelling clay and a plastic tablecloth). Nothing engages children more, than an adult sitting down and creating alongside them. This gave me the opportunity to talk about the shapes we were making e.g., squares, triangles, cube, pyramid, prisms. As we were creating, I noticed my grandson was making a triangular prism, so we talked about the differences between pyramids and prisms.
I told them that some people do not know that a square is a special rectangle and that all triangles do not have to have all three sides of equal length. Along with the interjection of math terms related to the geometric properties of shapes and figures, my grandchildren made discoveries about stability and perseverance. We had fun for about an hour, then decided to have a snack (after cleaning up, of course!)