Colin and I have been going to "Bumpers" for about 3½ years now. Many of the games give out tickets. From day one I was worried that he would learn that tickets could be exchanged for cheap prizes or candy that he would favor the ticket games over longer-lasting games.
Fortunately, I convinced him that its more fun to collect the tickets than it is to spend them. By now we have a large box full of tickets:
We went the other night and had excellent luck at this game where you roll quaters onto a belt with strips. If your quarter lands fully within a strip, you get some tickets. In four tries we got 83 tickets twice!
Colin was pretty excited to take the tickets home and lay them out on the floor. At Mommy's suggestion, we decided to measure how long they were. Turns out our 168 violet-colored tickets were 28 feet long! We decided to measure some others from our ticket archive too. After a bit we found out that all the tickets seem to be exactly two inches long. I showed him how each time you fold six tickets, that equals one foot.
Colin's idea was to get out Daddy's labeler to label the length of each set of tickets:
Not only are we learning math, but its also a chance to practice spelling! We use the sticky labels to hang them from the beam in the basement:
I'm not sure this project is done yet. I hope the labels are sticky enough to hold for a while, and that the cat doesn't decide to play with them.
UPDATE November 24: Here we are about halfway across the beam. We eventually had tickets hanging all the way across the room until Daddy got tired of walking through them and took them all down a few days later.
