September's Manipulatives - How They Are Used

On Day 2 with Mother Goose Time we learned about Places Friends Meet and we played a game called the Meeting Game.  We were given cards with different locations where friends might meet and play.  There was a school, a park, an ice cream shop, a fishing hole and a couple more I can't think of now.  We adapted the rules a bit because we have this awesome table top layout that their Dad made with roads on it.  I pulled it out and set the cards in different locations around the "town".  They each picked out a hotwheels type car and drove it from location to location.  Each child took a turn rolling the game cube which had pictures of all the locations on the cards.

I quickly found out, that with Adam joining in, I needed to tape the cards down.

Originally I was going to have them "drive" the school bus manipulatives we got this month.  Since they chose to drive the other cars I recommended that they use the school buses as counters and put one on each of the places they have visited.

Peter really wanted to color coordinate as well.  He really likes things to match.  But we soon found out we had more stops then we had colors.

 They really played nicely together.  Even being patient with little Adam as he tried to join in. 

Soon they discovered that they kept rolling some of the same stops.  So they decided together that once one location had been visited 3 times it could not be visited again.  I was pretty proud of this cooperation. 

 Mommy has the camera out, say cheese!

 Getting his trucks ready for the next stop.  You can see Adam is always watching. 

These little school bus manipulatives were so perfect to use for tracking.  Just one of many ways they can be used.

The next day, day 3 we learned how You Are Special.  On the lesson called Only One Me they had us ask, what do you have only one of on your body?  I gave them each one tangram and hold that one piece up to that one body part.

Part of this lesson asked us to just let them freely explore with the tangrams.  We were sitting at the counter eating breakfast so I just dumped them all out and let them do their thing.

Goose, our cat (yes confusing) sat patiently waiting for them to finish their cereal so that he could drink their milk. 

 Lachlan built and designed a rocket ship.

 Peter sorted his pieces by color.

 A closer look.

 Adam was in on the action too of course.  He "participates" quite a bit.  Most of the time he participates by observation.  But I know he is picking up on a lot!

 And a little love from Goose.  He loves to head butt.

I was pleasantly surprised at how long the boys played freely with these manipulatives.

Each month we get a counting/sorting manipulative and a shape manipulative.  The school buses being the counting/sorting and the tangrams being the shape manipulative for this month of September.

These are just a few of their uses so far this month, mind you, this is only documenting through day 3 of the 20 days.  They come back quite frequently in the lessons and the kids get them out just for fun too.  They can be used for counting, tracking, sorting, building, designing so on and so on.  I now have quite the collection after receiving 2 sets of manipulatives each month last school year.  I pull them out quite frequently as math counters for Lachlan when working on his 1st grade math.