My sister and I love hands-on projects. She is 7 and I’m 11, and I wanted to do something fun with her one weekend. No problem! We decided to make a dollhouse for her beanie babies. There was lots of math involved. We especially did lots of estimation and measurement. We used patterning for our walls - wallpaper and bricks. We also did lots of basic arithmetic – adding and multiplication mostly.

We needed estimation to be able to determine how big the house would be, first of all, and then how much paint, material and decoration supplies we would need for the house. We also had fun in a non-math related way, choosing paint colours and decoration colours.

Once we did that, we found a good foundation for our house, which was a wooden container about 20 cm by 13 cm and 3 cm deep. It was the bottom half of a box we found. We decided it was just the right size. Then I measured the inside of the box to be able to fit our walls in there. I made walls just tall enough to have 2 floors, about 12 cm tall each. So we made all four walls, plus the second floor, using measurement.

Before gluing the walls in place into the foundation, we wallpapered and painted the side of the walls that would be inside and then put paper ‘bricks’ on the other side. We used patterning for this, using colour, texture, design and size patterns with paper, and also estimation, to estimate how much white/green paint we would need respectively on the inside of the walls, and measurement to determine the area we would need for our wallpaper.

The walls were glued in to the foundation, and the roof was glued to the walls. We then measured everything again with a tape ruler to make sure that all the measurements fit. We then put paper ‘carpets’ on the floor and made our final touches – we added some dollhouse furniture, made a framed picture out of a stamp, made a lamp out of a straw and some paper, et cetera.

Et viola – our doll house for our beanie babies was done! And we couldn’t have done it without math.