Time-Line / Life-Line / Number-Line
A great activity I recently did with my son was a "life-line":
1. Take some letter sized printer paper and cut it in half (length wise). The child can do the cutting to practice their cutting skills with scissors.
2. Then tape the pieces together lengthwise to create a long strip of paper. We used a total of two pieces of paper (4 strips taped together) for my 5 year old son's life line, and three pieces of paper (6 strips taped together) for my life line (I'm a bit older than 5 so my life line had more going on than my son's).
3. Then, draw a long line down the centre of the long paper strip.
4. Label 0 at one end (to mark your child's birth) and your child's age on the other end (to mark how old he/she is now). Fill in the rest of the number line with all the years that are missing.
5. Then the fun part begins. You get to tell your child when they first talked, first walked. What major events happened in their lives, such as moving, going to preschool, learning to swim etc. For each event draw (or get your child to draw) a little picture to represent the event. My son also asked me to draw birthday cakes to represent each birthday (with the right amount of candles on each cake). He also asked me to remind him when he started to like dinosaurs, which colours he liked at what ages, etc.
6. Get your child to colour their life line pictures and put it up in their room for them to admire their life on a daily basis.
Not only is it a fun activity to do with your kids on a rainy day, but I think this activity has so many great math applications. First of all it gets the child to understand numbers better. They see that numbers are more than just counting. Sense of time is also learned, relating an event with a number. They start to realize that there can be something in between whole numbers (e.g. "You started to ride your bike when you were three and a half" pointing at the space in between three and four.) A child probably has a sense of their age, but putting it down on paper really clears it up for them. Patterns are also involved (birthday cake with number of candles each time increasing by one, etc.)
But most importantly, it lets your child start thinking about NUMBER LINES in general.
Number Lines are an extremely important concept for young minds in math. I read that one thing that divides high math achieving kids with low math achieving kids in the primary grades is that high achieving math kids have an internal understanding of number lines. When they add, they hop on their mental number line forward. When they subtract, they hop backwards. Fractions are not abstract to them at all since they can picture them on their mental number line. But the low achievers seem to have to always count (on their fingers), and with that, they can't quite get a grasp on arithmetic or fractions or negative numbers.
Therefore, this fun beginning of a number line disguised as an "arts and craft" activity is a great way to start their mental image of a number line. (Especially when they look at it everyday in their room.)
