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Educational Value of Play - Manipulative Play

Manipulative Play

Manipulative materials are varieties of common items (found around the home or bought) that children can arrange in different ways.  They need to observe and understand the characteristics of their objects in order to arrange them in different meaningful ways.

Suggested Objects:

Sorting and Grouping (Classifying)

Pattern Making

  • Beads - different shapes, colours, sizes, textures)
  • Coloured pop sticks
  • Coloured match sticks
  • Paper patty pans - coloured
  • Coloured paper mosaic shapes                                
  • Ceramic coloured mosaic squares
  • Coloured straws
  • Coloured pegs
  • Bottle tops - plastic and metal
  • Coloured macaroni (add 'Edicol Dye' to macaroni)
  • Shoe laces for threading
  • Plastic tubing for threading
  • Stips of card for children to glue on their objects to form their pattern
  • Pattern cards - home made or commercial - which show patterns for children to follow

 

 Physical

Picking up and placing these small items appropriately develops children's hand-eye coordination as well as their fine motor control.  Children learn control of their finger movements, picking up small beads and turning them around in their fingers to get the hole in the correct place, carefully threading beads or macaroni onto laces or plastic tubing (getting the tubing through the hole takes a steady hand!), and moving objects around.



Language/Social Development

Children describe the criteria they have used for sorting their objects of making their patterns.  By being able to name these attributes they are learning the language of:

  • colour      - eg. sorting into blue cars and green cars 
                      - eg. pattern goes red (popstick), blue (popstick), green (patty pan) ie. red, blue,green
  • shape      - eg. square, rectangle, circle, triangle, star, diamond
  • size          - eg. long, short, tall, small, big, little, fat, thin, heavy, light, wide, thin
  • function  - eg. go in water, go on land, go on rails, fly, roll, live in zoo, live on farm, carry passengers,
                             animal, vegetable, car, truck,train

Mathematical Concepts

  • Sorting and Grouping
    Using manipulative materials to identify attributes and sort them into groups according to these attributes provides a strong basis from which children's mathematical concepts develop.  Sorting and grouping is called classification.  As they put their objects into groups they are making sets and subsets.  As they work with these sets, number becomes they will start identifying which sets have more/less objects.  They will discover how many more, how many less, how many altogether (early addition and subtraction).  They will see how many several sets of the same number of objects make altogether (early multiplication) and they can share out their objects so that they see how many groups of the same number of objects they make (early division).  Making new sets the same, less or more objects establishes the importance of number and makes counting become more meaningful.
  • Pattern
    Early experiences of pattern can be the basis for later understanding of the complex structures of mathematics. (Algebra includes the study of number patterns and geometry includes the study of visual patterns).

    Children develop pattern making skills in the order copy, identify, extend:
    * Copy - children recognise the attributes of each individual component and match them on a one-to-one 
    * Identify - children recognise the relationship and sequence between the components - they find the rule.
    * Extend - children identify the rule and are able to continue the sequence of the pattern.

Pattern is represented in several ways.  Using the above materials, pictures or symbols make visual patterns.  There are also auditory patterns found in music and rhythm and physical patterns found in dance, gymnastic routines etc.