Dice Stamp Addition

Sweet Pea is 5 years old.  

 From:  This came from Housing a Forest, but it did not go as planned.  lol.

Material:

• Dice
• Paint
• Salt
• Paper
• Felt
• Paper Plate

Procedure:

• Pour some craft paint on a plate and sprinkle on a little salt. 
• Let your tot stir the paint and salt together with a spoon.

• Lay a piece of felt over the paint and salt and press down with the back of the spoon till the paint oozes through to the top of the felt.

• Allow your tot to press a die into the felted paint.

• Invite your tot to stamp the die onto a piece of paper.  
• Realize that the die stamp only left an outline of paint around the edges and doesn’t show any dots.
• Tell your tot to wait.
• Pour straight paint onto the plate and press a new die into it.

• Try to stamp the “straight paint” die onto the paper.
• Realize that the die has left a full square with no dots showing.
• Tell your tot to wait. 
• Go to your office and get out a real stamp pad.
• Tell your tot to wait.

• Press a new die into the stamp pad and try to stamp it on a piece of paper.
• Realize that the die has barely left any mark at all.

• Tell your tot to wait.
• Return the real stamp pad to the office.
• Hand the dice and paper plate with paint on it to your tot and let her try to unsuccessfully stamp the dice for approximately 30 seconds until she grows frustrated and asks, “What else?”

•  Suggest that your tot make hand prints with the paints.

• Watch as your tot makes exactly 1 hand print and then asks, “What now?”
• Remember that you saw a way to “make your own stamps” on Pinterest out of foam shapes, a bottle cap and a pencil.
• Tell your tot to wait.
• Go to the office.  Get foam shapes.  Search for a pencil. Draw a cool flower onto the foam shape.  Search for a bottle cap. Stick the foam shape to the bottle cap.  

• Try stamping the flower your have drawn.

• Think that maybe you are finally on to something and ask your tot if she wants to try making foam shape stamps.
• Listen to her say, “No, I’m done with stamping.”
• Plop your tot on the couch, tune the T.V. to Barney and make yourself a cup a tea. 😉

Observations:  If I could have made this work, I think Sweet Pea would have liked it.  She did have a brief bit of fun trying to stamp the dice, but quickly grew board since she couldn’t really create many recognizable marks.    The number 4 die was the only one that consistently worked for us.  The rest of the numbers were mostly unidentifiable.

Obviously, I can’t really recommend this activity.  lol.  However, I hope someone else will try it and tell me if they ever got the dice to really stamp enough to create a math activity. 

Notes from the Trenches:   I think we might have had better luck with regular dice.  Despite the fact that we literally own over 50 board games, the only dice I was comfortable using were an extra large set from a Math Dice game.  If any of you try this with regular dice, please let me know how it works.  Maybe I’ll buy a set and try again.

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