Yesterday was a rough shopping day. It took three stores to find the one thing I was looking for…who would have thought that black-lights could be that hard to find this time of year? While out and about Meatball was on his best behavior. Poor little guy was just about falling over exhausted. Since he was so good I let him pick out one item. His choice? A gourd…
Now what was I suppose to do with that?!
Then I remembered seeing this adorable Geo Math Pumpkin over at Fun.A.Day and I knew what we were doing. This Geoboard Gourd activity was a BLAST!
Earlier this month we had made some teal pumpkins to support FARE’s allergy awareness campaign and the kids ended up using golf tees to poke holes into their pumpkins, which they loved. So I knew this was right up their alley!
Items Needed to Make a Geoboard Gourd
How to Play
This activity is insanely easy and filled with all sorts of challenges. About the only thing that I had to do was help Meatball figure out how to use the Mallet. After that he did his own thing and had a blast exploring this activity. He played with it for a good two hours on and off, and even revisited it this morning! This is definitely an activity to let sit around for a couple of days to entice kids to come back and play.
Geoboards are such a fun investigative tool and this open ended activity really does take it to the next level. Not only did we explore shapes with our rubber bands, we also explored making them with the golf tees! In addition to be a math activity this was a fabulous process art challenge!
What Do Geoboards Teach?
Geoboards are a manipulative tool that are used typically to teach primary geometry. Some of the topics they teach are:
- plane shapes
- translation
- rotation
- reflection
- similarity
- co-ordination
- counting
- right angles
- pattern
- classification
- scaling
- position
- congruence
- area
- perimeter
And who said math had to be boring?!
If your family plays does this activity we would love to see the fun! Tag us on Facebook with @Parenting Chaos or on Instagram with #ParentingChaos!