Craft - a game board

We made this 2 weeks ago. It’s a simplified version of the snakes and ladder game – there are no snakes or ladders!

This was an actual art activity that was carried out at a place we used to go to for a Saturday afternoon free art activity. Back then he wasn’t ready for weaving so he instead pasted cut out coloured squares onto a game board.

For this piece, I pasted coloured paper on a cereal box for a firmer feel. He isn’t yet able to weave by himself but I explained and showed him how it should be done. At certain parts, I held his hand to help him weave it. I wanted him to learn to use both hands. I wanted him to see the pattern.

He wrote the numbers with the Crayola washable markers (I've now forgotten if I held his hand or not). He was able to recite the numbers up to 29 easily. He also got stuck at 39. So at these two points I helped him by asking him to count in 10s (10, 20, 30, 40) to get the idea that after 29 comes 30, and after 39 comes 40.

He chose the stickers to decorate the board. I advised him on which ones that would fit better – some of those he chose were way too big to fit the sides of the board. His visual spatial needs further work.

We played using a large rubber die. I bought it from a novelty shop in 1 Utama (Mini Toons). If thrown hard on the ground, a light inside the die will flicker.

I wanted him to get the idea that addition means the resulting number gets larger. That’s one of the reasons I decided to play this game (maths in a fun way). Recently he became a bit confused between addition and subtraction. School had taught subtraction but I’m not getting much progress in teaching him subtraction at home so, I’ll just focus on addition for now.

For the most part of the game, he was in the lead. Then I started throwing large numbers while he threw small numbers. When I overtook him, he wanted my counter while he’d give his counter to me. LOL! I told him it’s cheating. In the end, he did win. I hope he learned a little about social skills too!