Accepting that child’s play is really their form of “work” has been a concept that I realized over my parent journey.
This was really apparent to me the other day when I challenged my children with a creative idea. I was inspired by something I saw at a friends place years ago. The item was a Lego chess set.
As many people that know me, know that I love Lego and all that it offers. Since our collection continues to grow, many duplicate characters appear about the displays that are created. It hit me suddenly that we could possibly have enough of specific characters to create 8 pawns, 2 rooks, 2 knights, 2 bishops, a queen and a king with a theme to each side of the board.
After a couple hours of sorting, searching and creating….
Drum roll please, this was manifested.
The first step was deciding the characters, finding them and making sure they had the correct components as Zephyr ( my 4 year old son, who has been playing with Lego since before 2, loves to re create and invent new guys )
Then followed by colour choice of the board and searching out the necessary pieces to make the board come to life. This was great to observe and listen to how this was going to work. They had to make sure there would be enough room for the characters to stand and that all spaces were accounted for so the board was functional for a true game of chess !
Here’s a couple of action snap shots during our game …
Where did the math lesson take place you ask?
Well first it was counting the spaces on the fabricated chess board, then dividing the sides into sections, sorting the Lego and creating the dimensions to know which Lego pieces we needed to make this board function properly. Then the actual build itself and the playing of chess…. Counting spaces, making perdictions and a strategy.
See how play now becomes work
Loved the mind exercise of remembering which Lego mini fig represented which chess piece and how it was to move about the board.
Thanks for checking out my blog and leaving a kind comment about your thoughts on creative play=real life math ❤
Better Believers 