When is X Big?
Players: 2 or more
Ages: 4 and up
Cost: Free!
Math Ideas: Units, comparison
Questions to Ask:
When is ___ big? When is small?
When is ___ a lot? When is it a little?
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One of my favorite places in the world is the #tmwyk hashtag on Twitter.
If you don’t know, #tmwyk stands for “Talking math with your kids” and it’s a great place to find examples of parents and kids having delightful, surprising mathematical conversations.
This week’s game came straight from the hashtag, courtesy of Allison Hintz. She and her kids invented this game, as you can see from her original tweet.
I first tried this game with my own kids about a month ago, and our car rides have never been the same since. Almost every time we get in the car, my daughter asks “Can we play the ‘When is it big’ game?”
So in her honor, I am coining the game When is X Big?
How to Play
When is X Big? is simple and perfect for car rides, since all it requires is a little spare time.
You pose a question to your kids such as:
When is 4 big?
When is 100 small?
When is 10 a lot? When is it not very much?
When is 8 better than 4? When is 4 better than 8?
Then you and your kids brainstorm ideas. So if I ask my kids “When is 10 a lot?” they might decide that ten scoops of ice cream, ten minutes of holding your breath, and a bathroom with ten toilets each counted as “a lot.”
That’s it! Just try to be creative with your prompts, and follow your kids’ lead. Their ideas are the most important part of the game.
Where's the Math?
This game gets kids focused on all the various ways that numbers are used in their world. Numbers are used to count groups of objects (such as toilets) but also to measure things (such as pounds of turkey at the deli).
They’re also used to measure more abstract concepts such as time, temperature, and speed. Isn’t it interesting that 100 is “a lot” when you’re talking about a person’s age, the speed of a vehicle in miles per hour, or the temperature outside? And of course, 100% of anything is a lot. Makes me wonder how much we as humans gravitate towards scales of measurement that span roughly from 0 to 100...
Beyond these sorts of ideas, When is X Big? gets your kids hearing, and using, all sorts of mathematical language. And as I learned at the Promising Math Conference just last week, mathematical language is an absolutely essential part of kids' mathematical development.
There are two major categories of mathematical language: quantitative and spatial. Quantitative language includes the number words, of course, but also phrases like more than, less than, higher, lower, equal, the same, a lot, a few, and so on. You're helping your kids, just by supplying them with phrases that help them verbalize the ways that they notice and compare quantities.
Lots of other games help kids develop their spatial language. When in a game might you use phrases like beside, under, next to, flip, turn, inside, or across from? If you've been reading this newsletter for long enough, you can probably think of a few examples.
Questions to Ask
Below is a big list of questions you can use to prompt discussions. Just remember, the all-important follow up question: "Why?"
When is ____ big? When is it small?
When is ____ a lot? When is it a little?
When is ____ too much? When is it not enough?
When is ____ better than ____?
When is ____ the same as ____? (This one was my favorite. When is 10 the same as 5? When 10 socks are the same as five pairs! Awesome stuff about units)
When is ____ perfect?
When is ____ fair? When is it unfair?
Those are just some fruitful prompts that I've tried so far. Please, by all means, add your own! Just be sure to share on the #tmwyk hashtag on Twitter. Like I said, it's my favorite little neighborhood on the internet.