Two Projects You Can Do With Ceramic Tiles.... And A Little Time

Here is the catch with homeschooling. You will only have one income. The parent who stays home to care for the children will not be makin' money. So s/he must be frugal.

Here is another catch with homeschooling. Educational materials can be costly. Unless you are even marginally crafty, in which case you won't believe what you can make for super-cheap!

One of the reasons we homeschool is because I dont believe that educational materials must be terribly sophisticated or expensive. Most of what I learned as a child was using materials readily available in the home, yard, or at museums and libraries. Much of the rest is just for fun.

These number tiles (below) are fun. You can learn your numbers without them. But putting math concepts into the hands of a child *physically* can make life easier all around. I simply purchased some bathroom wall tile - approx 1.5 in sq - at a hardware store. For a sheet of 25 tiles I paid about $2. For 100 tiles, obviously, it cost me less than $10. Using a magic marker, I wrote the numerals on the tiles.

You can start with 1-10 for the younger child. Make sure they have the concept. Let the child lay out the tiles and put in order. This in itself can be a huge work. The child must know in what direction the number lies, and have the dexterity to line them up. Little Brother, although he knew his numbers, was not ready to tackle the entire grid of 100 until he was close to six. Now at age seven, he feels confident putting this together. Boys seem to have a different agenda at this age. :) Oh, and yes, number 71 is... possibly somewhere in the car.

Another fun project with tiles... I was inspired by the Montessori Imaginary Island Game. In this game a child can create an island using the land and water features he has learned previously. I wanted something really visual and tangible, so created these tiles. You can use square, but I found the hex tiles and really wanted to try them out. I am glad I did!

Each tile has land or water on it. Some are all land, some painted blue for all water. The rest are a combination. I figured out that if you want every type of tile to match up, you must establish a standardized location on the edge of each tile to connect. The middle of each edge was my 'marker'. So each river must start and end at the middle of two of the edges of each tile. Each spanse of water must also. The result is that you can make islands, lakes, rivers, etc. I was excited to add deltas to the ends of rivers and this has come in handy when studying the Nile.

I also found little glass 'blobs' at a discount store. The tops are painted with nail polish to be snow capped mountains, or magma filled volcanoes. And clear glass blobs are icebergs. This work has been great fun for girls and boys, friends of our family and also very popular with 60-some children ages 4 to 14 at a church summer camp. Even I still love working with it!

The cost of this Imaginary Island Game... About 10 bucks for gobs of tiles, 4$ for a tiny can of blue Rustoleum, 2 bucks for the glass blobs at the $ Store. What a deal.