This blog post is written by Lesley McLaren, Admin Assistant at Creative STAR 🙂 It’s a lovely example of problem-solving and maths in an outdoor and family context. Enjoy…
I have heard this question quite a lot over the holidays from my 10 year old son TM who is an avid Minecraft and Roblox fan. But when he asked the question on a day when the sun was shining, birds were singing, and it was actually quite warm outside, the answer was always going to be a NO!
So the whining began lol!
Luckily I had bought some chunky chalks I happened to see earlier in the week when doing some shopping, and TM thought these were fab!
And so the pavements, the driveway and the patio were brightly decorated with a variety of artwork, until he was bored yet again. I guessed drawing out Hopscotch was not going to solve this (been there, done that SO many times) so we came up with a huge Snakes & Ladders instead.
TM got quite excited as he took charge of putting in the snakes (note the very cruel one that takes you one step from home back down to number 9!) and gave me the job of adding the ladders.
Once the “board” was finished we had the problem of finding a dice. Rather than running indoors to hunt for one, we came up with an outdoor version….
The idea was to throw a wee stone from a pre agreed distance, to land on one of the numbers. We soon realised the stones kept landing outside the wee circle, and so TM came up with the idea to extend the range of each number, which worked much better. The stones still ended up out of range sometimes, so TM decided (of course after I had done this) that if it happened 3 times in a row you would loose your turn.
After hunting the garden for suitable stones to act as counters, the game was afoot!
There was lots of cheering, jumping and excitement during the game which we played over many times. And a wee triumph for me too – Computer 0 Mum 1.
But I bet you can guess which one of us ended up going down that wicked snake……..
