Play time with Conscious Craft & Tilly

Hi, it’s Amy here from @tillystoys on Instagram. I wanted to talk to you about the beautiful Mis & Match set from Grapat. It is a beautiful set that has over 400 colourful wooden cubes and it comes with a wooden storage box. It’s one of those delightfully open-ended toys that children are free to let their imaginations fly with. I’m a primary school teacher and as soon as I saw the set I knew that it was ideal for maths activities. Loose parts like these are so useful when children are learning those early maths skills. Here are a few ways that you might use Mis & Match with your child at home. My activities are aimed at children who are around 5 but you could easily adapt them for younger or older children.

Can you show me…

This activity can be used to help support children with counting. It can be extended to ‘Can you show me …. in a different way?’ At this point your child could use the different colours to show you a number in different ways. For example, 10 could be made using 6 red cubes and 4 blue cubes. You could then extend it further by asking ‘What about in a different way or how many ways can you show me…’ By showing you a number in lots of different ways your child is developing both their confidence and fluency.

Make a repeating pattern

This will help support your child with colour recognition and ordering and sequencing. When a simple repeating pattern becomes easy you can extend the activity by adding in more colours and challenging your child to make a more complex pattern.

How many are there?

Initially your child might count each cube singularly, and that’s fine. You could have a conversation about whether there is a quicker way. Maybe they could be counted in 2s, 5s or 10s.

How could you share these?

Simply put a pile of cubes in the centre and ask your child how they could share them. Tilly chose to draw two circles to share the cubes between. The sharing doesn’t have to be equal, or does it? Is it fair if they aren’t shared equally? These are questions that you could chat about together.

These are just a few ideas for how you could use Mis & Match to support your child’s learning. An alternative is to swap roles – you become the child and let your child be the teacher. You might be surprised with the maths ideas that they can come up with when they’re incharge!

Written by Amy Grant