Math-rich baby and toddler environment

I suggest creating multiple places around your home where you can easily and quickly put up pictures. And then adding lots of math pictures!

It is better to add something new to your picture places at least every day. This brings fresh attention to all the old pictures.

Where to get pictures? One of the best ways is to photograph the child doing something mathematical. For example, here are players of the Math Trek game making an inscribe polygon out of themselves:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/mathtrektriangle/

And here is a kid playing with the mirror book:

You can also draw pictures together with the kid. Include math ideas into the topics the child loves. For example, here is a picture of the prefix "hex-" (as in "hexagon") by a boy named Zak:

And here is a "star" made by a toddler and his mom by tracing hands, during a unit study on stars:

You can also print out cool math pictures that you and your kid find online. Here, for example, is a fractal cow my math club kids loved this week:

How can you put up pictures? First of all, they have to be at the eye level of the kid. For babies, measure the level of the eyes when you carry the baby, because you will be watching pictures together. Second, they have to be in busy places where you go a lot: corridors, kitchen, bathrooms... Here are a few methods:

• Whiteboard + scotch
• A fishing line or string along the wall, tied to two screws at the ends + clothespins
• Just wall + scotch (with smooth glossy paint, wood or stone)
• Cork board (not safe for babies because of pushpins)

Basically, you want to put up pictures in seconds. Then you can get into the habit of displaying any masterpiece the kid makes, or something you see in a journal, or a quick sketch of an idea.

~*~*~*~*~*
Here is a recipe for making "baby fractals" out of any shape your child likes. Try it at home!

1. Draw an iconic number picture, for example, a dog with four paws.
2. Dot the tips of your picture's "limbs." You will have the iconic number of dots, in this case, four.
3. To make the second level of the picture, draw its smaller copy at each dot. Then dot those copies!
4. Keep going for as many levels as you wish.

Here is a child's drawing of fractal heart from my math club last week:

This is also easy to make with tracing the big hand of the parent and smaller hand of the baby, or using finger paint to print. Here is a somewhat creepy computer-generated image of a fractal hand:

What math ideas will you show to your child?