For a Christmas present for my nephew, I painted a mural on his wall. The final idea was developed collaboratively with my sister and her partner. Originally I was just going to paint his name- but my sister is so interested in making learning opportunities, she wanted it to be ‘educational’. She originally wanted the figural numbers, 1, 2, 3… but I pointed out that children his age (um, just over 1 year) are still learning the concepts of numbers, there’s no point teaching them the figural numbers… just like there’s no point teaching them the letter symbols.
So I said we should put on dots, and group them in clumps. This is how we actually count. If I threw down 23 marbles, you’d visually group up sets of 5, for example, and then see the 3 marbles remaining. You wouldn’t have to count, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. I can’t seem to find the statistic for how high the average set size is, which people can visually ’see’. Is it 8? I know there are autistic people who can count hundreds of objects all at once. Anyway!
That was the idea behind putting the dots on the balloons. In the basket then, we have the figures for the numbers. And we have colours too. So they can play games by throwing balls at the balloons, getting points, etc. And it’s just fun to look at.
As soon as I was working on it, he was interested in getting up and touching a balloon and touching each dot, one after another. I think it might actually help him. Who knows!
i love my mural, mommy is going to get glow in the dark paint and paint the dots.