The Halloween Graph

Make a graph out of your Halloween Treats and Learn something in the process.  Activity is aimed at early elementary

1.  Create a grid on a poster board where the squares are fairly large (these are two by two cm - see photo).

2.  Pull out any treats that are particularly large and won't work for the activity.  Set those aside.

3.  Have your child help you "sort" your candies and place them on the grid so that each candy only uses one sqaure (in at least one of the directions)  - See photo

4.  Have your child think about what the graph represents by comparing the "results" of their study.

5.  Let your child eat one or two of their "treats".

Learning advantages:  

Sorting Practice - how will you sort yours?  By brand?  By type?  By flavor?  Nuts, vs no nuts? Fruit flavor?  Hard vs. Chewy?

Introductions to Graphs and Pictoral Representation of Numbers

Comparing and Contrasting Practice.


Originally Published on "Homework Club" Site 2010

Do a Subtraction Scavenger Hunt.

Math Scavenger Hunt

Place a known number of objects (that are the same) out for your child to see and count (choose a number in line with your child's skills, for example if your child easily adds to ten but has a harder time with sums equaling 15, choose 12 objects).  Ask your child to count the objects and then look away.

 

Remove a number of objects and hide them while your child is not looking.  Ask your child to count the number of remaining objects to figure out how many objects must now be found.  If you started with 12 and there are 5 remaining objects, your child now gets to go find the remaining seven.  Do this once or twice and then move on.  If you make it a habit to play this game a couple of times every few days, your child is getting wonderful practice with subtraction without ever knowing that is what she/he is doing.  To maintain motivation if she/he starts getting bored with the game you could make the objects something he/she likes to collect and they get to be added to the collection once they are found.

Watch a Fruit Tree

This activity is perfect for kids up to about kindergarten or first grade.  It may seem like a long time to watch a tree over an entire year, but it helps kids connect to nature in new ways.  A full understanding of how weather and seasons cycle in your locale.  Start by choosing a fruit tree to observe throughout the year.  Sketch or photograph your tree once each month to observe how it changes from month to month.  Make sure to take note of the weather.  At the same time, observe the tree for other life as well.  What kinds of insects and birds are visiting it?  How many of each do you see?  Do you see more or less than the month before?  Are there any animals living in or around it?  You might even increase your frequency of checks during the spring and summer months to once per week.  Your child will learn more than you can imagine from this simple activity even if you miss a month - chances are, once invested, your child won't let you forget anyway.

As an accompianment to the activity you might also read "The Giving Tree" by Shel Silverstein, "The Great Kapok Tree" by Lynne Cherry or any number of other wonderful books about trees.

Bonus Activities:

• SCIENCE AND MATH:  For kids in elementary school, once you've finished collecting your information you could make a graph showing temperatures from month to month, frequency of visits from pollinators from month to month, or any other numeric data you recorded consistently along your tree observation journey.  To really take it to the next level, you could ask something like, "if the temperature on the day you observed the tree seemed to be related to animal activity around the tree".  Graphing is an important skill in both math and science education and if your child is invested in what is being graphed, he/she will learn a lot more from graphing something "real" to him or her than from doing worksheets about somebody else's graphs and information.
• THE ARTS:  Ask your kids if they can artistically show their tree in all four of the seasons - this might mean drawing or painting (no the picture here was not done by a child), or it might mean they choreograph a dance that shows how their tree changed, or it could mean some sort of animation if you offer up a video camera and some clay or LOTS of paper. . .

Place Value Popsicle Sticks

While my daughter is great at reading, she is more reluctant when it comes to math as well as writing.  knowing this, I started introducing certain math games and concepts even before Kindergarten officially began.  We played games using dominoes for simple addition problems, a clock and flashcards for telling time, and a host of other ideas I'm sure I'll find time to post at some point for your experimenting pleasure.  This idea was discovered when I was teaching preschoolers, but didn't go well the first time I tried it at home.  A  small tweak later it went much more smoothly!

I'm sorry I don't remember exactly which resource this idea came from, but I do know I've seen the idea in multiple places on the internet and in schools.  The original idea is to take popsicle sticks and simply write single digits on one end of each so that you have two popsicle sticks for each single digit.  In a classroom setting each child is given a can full of one set of sticks and then there is a competition.  In a preschool or kindergarten setting you might only work with one stick for each child and just see by luck of the draw who comes up with the highest or lowest number.  As children develop a good number sense you start adding sticks so each child is pulling more sticks as the group ability grows.  Once all the children know how to count to 100, for example, you might have them pull two sticks/participating student.  The students then have to try to get the lowest number by placing their sticks in the right order to give them a good chance of being lowest (or highest) in the class.  For example, if after they've pulled their sticks you say "lowest" and the child has a 1 and 7, they are much more likely to have the "best number" if they put the 1 in the "ten's" position and the 7 in the "ones" position.  This way children learn how to manipulate their digits using place value to increase their chances of having the best number.  As children continue to grow in understanding they can handle more and more sticks.

The trouble with doing this in a home-school setting is that even if you have more than one child, they probably aren't at the same level of understanding and the competetive aspects of the game that motivate some children to really think about how they place their posicle sticks is lost.  My child just wasn't motivated to give it her best try.  Even in a group setting this is true and it simply never worked for everyone.  That is why in the mortar-and-brick classroom teachers have to teach and re-teach.  You find multiple methods to teach the same skills in order to touch on multiple learning styles and motivation techniques.  It is not the fault of our lovely public school teachers that our school system simply does not lend itself to efficiency.

I really thought that since my kid likes to be able to move things around in order to learn (letter magnets to learn to read, puppets and herself to "act out" stories she is reading etc.)  I thought she would love the posicle sticks for making numbers.  But she simply wasn't motivated to try to figure out how to make two or three numbers go together to make the lowest or highest possible number overall.  Without the competetive factor, the game just lost its luster.  She tried to please me by simply setting the sticks out to make a number but I could tell there was no thought behind how she placed them and when I asked her about it, she said, "this is boring mom".  I put the sticks away and thought, "okay maybe she just isn't quite ready for place value (It is most often introduced in first or second grade) or there is a better way to present the concept to her".

However, she LOVES to play with blocks.  So, a week or so later, when I added place value manipulatives into the mix where if she figured out the lowest number possible, she could "build" the number with her base ten blocks, all of a sudden it made all the difference in the world.  Now she wanted to build "hundred's numbers"  In reality she is working each "problem" twice and asks to do so.  Now if I could just find a way to make practicing writing her letters and numbers as easy!