Comparing weights

Here's another Mathstart book i happen to borrow from the library. This time the theme is on Comparing weights.  It's a fairly simple book on the sizes and weight of a girl's toy.

 Following the book, we played this weighing game set. It comes with fruit miniatures and weights. The objective is to find out the weight of a fruit or a bundle of fruits.

Here's the picture of the game set if anyone's interested. However, i've to say the quality is really poor; the balance beam doesn't quite balance!

Give me half!

I first learnt about MathStart books from My Playschool.net But i didn't think much of it until i read about it again on The Pig and Rabbit. Hence i decided to borrow from the library to check out the content and if it was any good to buy them for keeps.

Although some of the books didn't sit well with me (I thought the maths lessons tend to get drowned by the storyline in some of the books. In other words, it doesn't bring out the lesson as clear as i would like it to be), i still use some selected few as my 'textbook'- as a guideline on what and how to teach certain Maths topics.

 Here's the first book i used. This is about Fraction, or rather about halves. Just to kickstart the lesson, I first read this book to N for a couple of nights.

Basically, i wanted N to know that dividing something into halves means splitting into two and not just that, it has to be two EQUAL parts. So i made the following activity for him.

I cut out some shapes (2 each). One set is cut equally into halves, and the other not. I asked Sonshine boy to identify which shapes were cut into halves and which were not.

Here are the shapes that are not equally divided into halves.