Measure-ate it—an accidental maths lesson

A couple of days ago, we were playing with jigsaw puzzles. I love it when the children want to do this because I think of it as a rich way to learn - with their little brains trying this piece and that piece, solving the puzzle. It's fun and exciting ;) Sweet-pea has especially taken to our Nemo puzzle and was engaged in a race with Sunshine to finish first. Sweet-pea did have a head start, and a bit of help from me - which I did more from a perspective to spend time with her, rather than to really help her. The head start was kind of substantial and she won.

Feeling very pleased with herself, Sweet-pea then announced it was time to "measure-ate it". Upon further investigation, I realised she meant measure it. My natural reaction to this was to say, "oh no, you don't need to measure it... what a funny thing to do..." but fortunately, before I spoke I realised the beauty of the situation. She was naturally learning, and my role in that was to support her, and offer what knowledge I could to enrich her learning in this path she was naturally interested in.

Off she ran to get the ruler and before we knew it, I was teaching her how to measure with a ruler each side of the puzzle. 18cms each side. After that, we discussed how all the sides being equal meant that it was a square. She felt quite satisfied and while she might not remember all that we did and the rules that I demonstrated to her (ie, all sides of a square are equal in length, when you measure with a ruler make sure you line one edge up with the line above the 0, etc.), her brain made new pathways to learning and natural investigation which are valuable in her education journey.