World Culture Activity Video: Math

Celebrate the ways we use math!

Activity best for children age 3 and up

At San Diego Children’s Discovery Museum we love learning about new cultures from around the world. Today we are going to learn how math is a very important part of everyday life for people everywhere. Math helps us to understand our world better by measuring things like how high mountains are, how far it is to travel somewhere and how hot or cold the weather will be. Math is used to make our world better by helping to make medicine and other products that keep us safe and healthy. Math is needed to build everything from boxes to cars, to airplanes and buildings. Math helps us to explore our different places on our planet like the oceans, the forests, the air. Math is even used by artists when making different kinds of art!

Think about all the ways you use math in daily activities. For example, do you do any of these things?

  • Using money to buy things
  • Measuring ingredients for a recipe
  • Playing a game like dominos or uno
  • Recognizing shapes
  • Telling time on a clock

Math is such a part of everyday life that we don’t even pay attention to how much we use it! Let’s celebrate math with this fun, colorful, and creative art activity.

Materials You’ll Need:

Colorful paper

Scissors

Directions

STEP 1
Have a grown up help you to cut out lots of geometric shapes from colored paper. Triangles, squares, and rectangles are the basic shapes, but you can add other shapes as well.

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STEP 2
Use the tangrams (the shapes) to make all kinds of designs like animals, houses, flowers, even rockets ships!

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STEP 3
Have fun using math to create art!