Visiting with friends of all ages:

Running, running, running, follow-the-leader style:

Playing quiet, make-believe games with new friends (there was some kind of bank robbing scenario where the park bits—which they put in the empty containers—were coins, and the watering cans were piggy banks):

Looking for bugs (yes, that’s Daegan):

And swinging barefoot in the sunshine.

Summer is coming!

“You know Mom, some numbers make good parts of dinosaurs. Like a 7 makes a good pterodactyl wing, and an upside down 6, or 9, make a good apatosaurus neck. And the round part is, of course, the head!”

–Daegan, out of the blue as he was working on his math one morning

I later found this drawing, which he told me he began with a zero (the body) and some 7s (the wings):

I was also wondering a bit about the ‘flasher’ pose, but when Daegs told me about his drawing he told me that bit between the legs was a tail. Whew!

Yes, that’d be snow in the background. The part of the yard that gets shaded by the fence (and is north-facing) still has snow, but take a look in the other direction:

Not only is there no snow to be had, we’ve got some new green growth near the house, in this sheltered, south-facing spot. If I ever try growing grapes in this yard, that’s where they’ll be planted! I think this is the beginnings of a Johnny jump-up / viola:

And I know this is the start of a hollyhock. We have a huge clump of them right under our living room bay window, and their seeds go everywhere. So nice to see green again!

Gareth wanted to show me some grass he has picked, to feed his herd of plant-eating dinosaurs:

Gareth’s other preoccupation, which is spent quite a bit of time on, was taking apart dried hollyhock stems. He found the hollow stems (where insects hibernate) and the soft spongy interior quite fascinating:

Daegan, on the other hand, started rummaging through the leaf litter:

At first he found only new green growth (I am not sure if it is creeping jenny or creeping charlie):

But then he found what he was looking for; two of them, in fact:

He gave one to Gareth, and the boys played with them for ages, before carefully putting them back in the leaf litter. While it is warm during the day, we are a long way from warm nights or the end of snowy weather in Alberta. (In fact, we get most of our snow in spring in Calgary, in March and April).

Then Gareth found something else to play with—perhaps the greatest kid plaything ever: MUD!

And here is how their afternoon ended. A lovely, lovely day. Hope to do it again soon!

I began giving each boy 1 stick. “What can you make?” I asked. We quickly found out the answer: not much with only 1 stick! You could make 1 (one), I (capital ‘aye’), or l (lower case ‘ell’). That was about it. I then gave the boys a second stick. “What can you make now?” Here’s some of the possibilities, both letters and numbers:

Note that the final two shapes could also be symbols: the equal sign, or the plus (adding) or times (multiplying) sign.

With three sticks there were even more letters and numbers, and our first shape. Here are some of them:

And with four sticks we could make a couple of shapes, and more:

I threw out words like ‘quadrilateral’ and ‘rhombus’, and pointed out that all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. Gareth decided he’s played enough and wanted to do some drawing, but Daegan was keen add more sticks. We focussed on shapes from here on in.

With five sticks, a pentagon:

At this point we abandoned the paper underneath, as it was sliding around and making it harder than it needed to be to place the sticks in position. I told Daegan that another shape you could make with 5 sticks was a star, and showed him how to do it, using the interior angles of the pentagon as a guide:

With six sticks, Daegan got very excited about hexagons. “I know where we see those in nature! In a beehive!” And he started flapping his arms and buzzing like a bee:

He then opened the nearby cupboard and got out some Crispex cereal, another hexagon. It got gobbled up nanoseconds after I got this shot:

We then played around making shapes inside the hexagon (as we had done with the star in the pentagon), and found this:

Note that as these are all equilateral triangles, we can use this image to prove that the interior angles of a hexagon add up to 720 degrees. (Each angle in the triangle is 60 degrees, as 60 x 3 = 180 degrees, which is the number of degrees in  a triangle. Since two angles from each triangle are used to make the interior angles of the hexagon, and there are 6 triangles, you get 6 x 120 = 720 degrees). I did NOT do this with my seven year old in case you are wondering!

We quickly made a heptagon (7 sides), talking about how you don’t often see that shape anywhere, and moved on to the octagon. Daegan had an idea right away to complete the image:

Have fun with this activity; it’s quite flexible and can be adapted to different ages and abilities.