For our December advent countdown, I have been trying to do different and fun activities each day with the kids. This has not been 100% successful, as sometimes we are too busy or I just did not have enough time to plan. Thankfully, k and n are pretty understanding.
One of the activities I did have time to plan for came from the newly published book, Math Lab for Kids, by Rebecca Rapoport and J.A. Yoder. 
I was fortunate to win five books from Quarto Knows, and this was of my choices. The subtitle appealed to me: “Fun, Hand-On Activities For Learning With Shapes, Puzzles, and Games”. When I showed it to my kids, they were immediately drawn to it. k is more of my math girl and n is more of my science/engineering boy, but they both were excited to do the activities.
The book is divided into nine chapters:
- Geometry: Learn About Shapes
- Topology: Mind-Bending Shapes
- Color Maps Like a Mathematician
- Stitching Curves
- Fantastic Fractals
- Terrific Tangrams
- Toothpick Puzzles
- The Game of Nim
- Graph Theory
Each chapter has three to eight “labs” or activities associated with it. For our advent activity, I chose the first chapter, which includes “Prisms and pyramids and Platonic solids, oh my!”
The hands-on labs include easy to follow directions on how to make various geometric shapes with just toothpicks and gumdrops. I really appreciated how easy it was for me to gather the materials. I already had toothpicks at home, so I just had to pick up a bag of gumdrops during my holiday shopping!
The kids were excited to get to work.
After n made some of the shapes, he wanted to take a more creative route and created this masterpiece called “A Man Walking His Dogs”.
This is k looking through her dodecahedron. That night, she took the book to bed with her because she wanted to look through the rest of the chapters!
The recommended grade levels for this book are 2-5, and I would say that is about right. This book would be good for both kids who are interested in math as well as those who think math is boring, as it presents the subject in a fun way that makes it appealing to everyone.