Building Towers

Early Years (Age 3 – 6)

Curriculum Goal

Kindergarten: Demonstrating Literacy and Mathematics Behaviour

  • Demonstrate an understanding of numbers, using concrete materials to explore and investigate counting, quantity, and number relationships (#15).

Context

  • Children can play in pairs or one-on-one with an educator.
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Appendix A
Appendix B

Materials

  • Game board (Appendix A)
  • Number cards, dot cards, or word cards (Appendix B) or dice
  • 80 unifix cubes total – 40 cubes of the same colour for each player

Lesson

  • Players take turns drawing a number/dot/word card (Appendix B) from a shuffled pile (or rolling the dice), building a tower using that many unifix cubes, and placing it on the corresponding number on the game board (Appendix A).
  • The game ends when each player has had 5 turns or all 10 cards have been drawn from the deck.
  • Then each player stacks all of their towers to make one big tower.
  • Children can compare to see whose tower is taller and by how much.

Look Fors

  • Can the child identify…
    • How many unifix cubes tall is the tower?
    • How many more unifix cubes does your tower need to be the same height as the other player’s tower?
    • How many unifix cubes does your tower need to get rid of to be the same height as the other player’s tower?

Related Lessons

This activity uses the same game board, building on the concept with the inclusion of Bingo rules.

An image linking to the Cuisenaire Rods lesson

This activity uses concrete materials to help students visualize numbers and number relationships.

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Appendix A
Appendix B

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