“Go around the tree, through the tunnel, over the rocks, under the parachute and onto the swing. Then throw a beanbag through the hula hoop and run and touch the fence. The first person to do that WINS!”

I listen as five-year-old Juan walks his eager friend through the steps of the obstacle course he has just created.

When people think about early math skills, they often think about numbers—including number recognition and counting. But spatial reasoning is another important aspect of early math learning.

Juan has kicked off our morning of math learning with a burst of spatial vocabulary!

Words like around, through, over, under, above, below, between and beside describe where things or people are in space.

Obstacle courses are a great way for children to learn, hear and use spatial language while developing their spatial skills. Obstacle courses also teach sequencing, memory and following directions. Best of all, kids LOVE them!

When designing your own obstacle course, consider the elements that will make it both fun and challenging. Try out these options:

• Something to jump over or into such as rope, pool noodles, chalk lines or hoops. I often use chalk to draw shapes such as circles, squares, rectangles or triangles just to sneak some more math into our day. As children start to identify shapes, they are building the foundation for geometry.
• Something to climb over. When we’re indoors, we use pillows. When we’re outside, we climb over the picnic table or up the slide. The slide is a feature in many of our obstacle courses.
• Something to weave around and between. We often use cones or buckets, recycled two-liter plastic bottles filled with water or natural landmarks such as trees, bushes and gardens.
• Something to crawl through or under such as tunnels, parachutes or boxes.
• Something that requires a bit of balance or care when navigating such as a curved rope, river rocks or tree stumps.
• Something to run to, such as a fence, a tree or a door.

When older children are here after school, we often use a stopwatch to time how long it takes to complete the course. This exposes our children to data analysis and record keeping.

Some students may want to use their drawing skills to create a map of the obstacle course. Keep clipboards and pencils nearby because this activity catches on quickly!

You can add more math learning opportunities by counting the hoops or cones as children go through or around each one.

You can measure the distance between cones or stones—or simply use spatial language to describe the distance, using words such as closer together or farther apart.

Obstacle courses are also great for developing gross-motor skills. Include activities such as crawling, jumping, skipping and hopping. If your outdoor area has natural slopes and uneven terrain, these areas are perfect for fostering the development of early gross-motor skills.  

We all see the need for self-regulation in young children. Occupational therapists often use movement to support physical and mental regulation and increase a child’s attention span, focus and alertness. That’s reason enough to create a math curriculum that involves an obstacle course!

An obstacle course may look like play, but it’s chock full of learning opportunities. When we take the time to explain how activities like these can support early childhood learning and development, parents and administrators begin to develop a deeper understanding of our early childhood curriculum. 

Ready to take a deeper dive into spatial learning? Check out the Early Math Counts lesson plan Over, Under, Through. After you engage in the activity, click on the Connect With Families button on the left side of the page and customize the letter to send home to the families of the children in your classroom.

Be sure to let us know how your obstacle course turned out and share helpful tips in our Comments section. Have fun!

Kamii’s lists several types of games that support early math concepts. These are:

• Aiming Games
• Hiding Games
• Races and Chasing Games
• Guessing Games
• Board Games
• Card Games

My favorite game – completely made up by the fabulous teachers at my former preschool- was called “Steal the Jewels.”

The premise is simple.  Take a whole bunch of shiny strings of beads (the New Orleans Mardi Gras kind work really well) and make a pile of them in one area of your indoor gross motor area, or outside, if it is warm.

The children decide the rules.  They may choose to make it a chasing game, where some children are the Stealers and some children are the Rescuers.  The Stealers run to the jewels and steal one string (or two, if the children choose that) and try to get their jewels to the Stealers’ place.  The Rescuers try to tag the Stealers, and if successful, the Stealers give up their jewels and they are returned to the original spot.

Encourage the children to make rules that prohibit grabbing the jewels from each other, or tagging too hard.  It works best if the Rescuers assign one child to be the Protector of the jewels, and only the Protector can hover around the pile.

At the end of the designated time (5 minutes, 10 minutes), play is stopped and the children  either count the jewels or weigh them.  There are now two piles of jewels: the original jewels and the rescued jewels.  Compare the weights or the number of jewels, and play again. This game is fun, exciting, engaging, and the math possibilities are strong.

What kinds of gross motor games do you play?

Duh!  Of course they did. It makes perfect sense that “balance” and “young children” and “games” leads to “balance beams,” “running games,” and “big, outdoor play.”  It got me thinking about how lucky we are that the concepts we are meant to cover in the early childhood curriculum can be infused in broad and  meaningful ways.

If “balance” is this month’s theme, then it stands to reason that children should explore balance in a variety of ways.  As they develop physically, they are continually exploring their own personal sense of balance, first while crawling, later by toddling, eventually by walking, and finally by running, skipping, and hopping.

These games provide another avenue for children to explore balance.  Remember to reinforce the mathematical concepts and encourage children to distribute the weight so it is the “same on both sides”.

HOME MADE BALANCING GAMES

Here are a few examples of fun home-made relays you can do with your children to stimulate their balance. They will enjoy doing them and have lots of fun.

 

PENGUIN WALK

All you need is a couple of bean bags, or you can make little bags filled with uncooked rice. All the children line up at the start line and they put their “egg” (the beanbag) on top of their feet and then they try to walk like a penguin, without dropping the egg. The first child who can make it to the finish line is the winner. It’s a very easy game, but it is hilarious to see the children “wobble” like a penguin and they will have good laughs too!

POTATO AN D SPOON RACE

A hilarious and famous party game! In this relay game all the players divide into teams and every team gets a spoon with a potato on it. Now the children need to complete the distance till turning point and back without dropping the potato and then give the spoon to the next player in the team. If the potato drops, that player of the team has to start again at the starting line. The first team to have all its players complete the course is the winner. A balance relay game for 4 years and up.

HOLD THE ORANGE

This relay game is played in pairs. Every pair stands face to face with each other and try to pinch an orange between their foreheads without using their hands. Now every pair has to complete a distance without dropping the orange and it’s not allowed to use hands to hold it in place. A fun balancing race game.

BALANCE CHALLENGE

For this balance challenge you need a piece of wide adhesive tape, like duct tape or other white or grey tape. Make a straight line on the floor with the tape about 10 feet long and 3 inches wide. This is the balancing “beam”. Have the children walk over it and like in Simon Says invent more and more challenging tasks for the children. Watch their feet to check if they stay on the beam. Useful tasks for their balance: have them walk the line with a book on their head, backwards, hopping on one foot, or with a book on their head and something in their hands and so on. Use your imagination and have fun!

 

Reprinted from Best Children’s Games website