Best for: 3 to 5 year olds
What it’s good for
Sending a car down a ramp and reading how far it travelled brings numbers and a bit of early science together. Your child sees the numbers in order standing for further and further along, which is good groundwork for understanding what numbers really mean, and they start to notice that a steeper tube or a heavier car changes the result.
What you’ll need
- A few toy cars (or trains, balls, or beads)
- A poster tube (or a kitchen roll tube, flat cardboard, or rolled-up cardboard)
- A large sheet of paper (or masking tape, or a ruler)
- A pen
What to do
- Rest one end of the tube on a table or chair and the other on the floor to make a ramp.
- Lay the paper out from the bottom of the tube and mark some numbers along it. The numbers 1 to 5 are plenty, and they don’t have to be real measurements.
- Let your child drop a car down the tube and watch how far it rolls.
- Ask them to call out the number it reaches: “It stopped at four.”
At nursery this is one we love to set up outside on a slope and leave running, so children come back to test their own ideas about what travels furthest. At home, the gentle grass slopes of Marble Hill Park make a brilliant giant version on a dry day.
Make it simpler
- Use just three numbers, close together.
- Point to the number it reaches and say it with them.
Make it trickier
- Spread the numbers further apart so the car can reach higher ones.
- Try heavier and lighter things down the tube and see what changes.
- Tip the tube steeper or flatter and talk about why the car goes further.