How to introduce 3 year olds to cubing

[newtonbase]

I have been asked to demonstrate cubing to my son's nursery class and I'm looking for ideas. They are mostly 3yo. They know some colours and numbers and are learning to count. The nursery will be supplying the cubes.
I don't yet know how many sessions I'll be doing or how long they will be but my main goal is to make it fun and hopefully get a couple of them interested in learning to solve.
My thoughts so far are to start with the colours, get them counting stickers and doing opposites, up, down,front, back etc. I'll also try them with a couple of patterns.
Has anyone here done anything similar? What has worked?

 

[FastCubeMaster]

-I actually agree with the two messages below this one, but this is my advice if it had to be done for whatever reason-

2 Pieces of advice I have:

-When you are teaching them to solve the cube, I reckon start from the easiest step, then work your way to the most intuitive. e.g. Learn fruruf to get the yellow cross first, then maybe end with first side corners or cross.

-naming cases and patterns is a fantastic idea. Fish for sune..etc
I think that will really help the kids attach algs to their cases.

Bonus tip (lol) take everything really slow, sounds like a pretty difficult job you have there

 

[SenorJuan]

You got me 'scratching my head' for a while, it seems too advanced for such young children. Not so much in the physical sense - I think it would be challenging, but the reward would be better hand-eye co-ordination, which would clearly help with other activities like drawing, writing, building space-ships out of wooden blocks etc. [giving my age away, there]. It's the mental aspect that I think is too challenging, visualising it as a three-dimensional puzzle.
However, I gave it some thought... and one introductory strategy that would have a chance is 'mosaic building'. I would choose 2x2x2 for this, and you'd need 8 or 9 of them to make it worthwhile. This obviously only requires matching a pattern on one face with no regard to unseen edges, so the cube is reduced from a puzzle to a 'pretty-pattern-maker'. Mosaic-building is also a good group activity.

This will also allow you to work out which of the youngsters have the potential to be future World Champions, and then selectively introduce them to the concepts of one-look solving etc, HeHe..

 

[mark49152]

I agree with @SenorJuan. In my experience of 3 year olds, they just don't have the motivation, patience, attention span, or logic skills required for solving cubes (despite the occasional exception paraded on Youtube). Mosaic building is a great idea for turning it into a relatively easy fun group activity, if you have enough cubes.

 

[newtonbase]

I'm not expecting to discover the next Leo or Chan Hong Lik and there won't be time to get anyone solving so having fun will do for now.
The mosaic idea is excellent. They have a letter of the week which would be easy or maybe a smiley face.

 

[AlphaSheep]

My fiance is a preschool teacher, and she's tried using cubes in classes with 4 to 6 year olds. Her objective was to teach them about 2D and 3D shapes (squares vs cubes), and some counting (3 layers, 9 stickers), and then got the class to play around with getting all of the white stickers onto one face. Some of the older kids got the idea, but for the 4 year olds, attempting solving a face was something they got bored of very quickly.