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.

Natural learning

Thought I'd share this piece of natural learning Sunshine and Sweet-pea have taken to in the last few weeks. They call it "play the game of [movie]". Basically, they pick a movie and put it on (usually a Barbie or another sort of animated movie), then they choose who will play who and act out the entire movie in front of the television while the movie is playing. They have costume changes (many different outfits for different parts of the movie - shoes included!). They make special swords with wooden spoons and tie ribbons on the end of the spoons.

Earlier today I wondered if it was good for them to be doing this so much. Shouldn't I encourage them to go outside instead? But then I realised what they were doing. They were naturally teaching themselves a range of things. Here is a short list of what I believe they were teaching themselves (that I can think of - I bet there are many more I can't think of):

1. Drama/acting - they were copying the actions of each character. Facial expressions and arm movements etc.


2. Reciting/memory - they were learning the words and speaking them over and over. Experiencing and reinforcing sentence structure and grammar.


3. Teamwork - working together to achieve an outcome.


4. Social behaviour - learning how other people relate and how to relate to each other whilst achieving the goal of "play the game of [movie]".


5. Interpretation - everything they did was an expression of what they were interpreting of what was occuring in the movie.


6. Independence and innovation - they made this game up themselves. They designed the rules and procedure and defined the outcome.


7. To entertain themselves - an extremely valuable skill in my eyes!


8. To experience natural learning and to be guided by their own interests - I believe this is a key to them developing a lifestyle of learning.

So that is just a few learnings that I can think of off the top of my head. I bet there are more. With all that swirling around in my head, yep, I think it is good for them; and I want to encourage them to "play the game of [movie]" without concern that they are watching too much television; and with peace of mind of knowing that even if I am not sitting down at a table with them making them doing structured lessons that they will learn anyway ... and have fun doing it!