Math Archives - Page 14 of 19

Easter Egg Hunt for Missing Numbers with Printable

March 17, 2015 By Deirdre

Last spring we did a cool math for kids activity that featured an Easter egg craft and and tally chart. This year I decided to make another Easter themed math activity. It has two parts just like last year activity did. Kids have an Easter egg hunt outside and complete this Hunting for Numbers Page(This page has been updated) inside. Actually you can do both activities inside your home or classroom. We did this activity on a beautiful spring day! It made sense to take the Easter egg hunt outside.

Before we started the egg hunt I placed an egg shaped sticker with a number on it inside each of the eggs. (I didn’t have egg shaped stickers so, I cut them out of round colored stickers. You may have egg shaped stickers or may choose to purchase some.) There were stickers created for each of the missing numbers on the math sheet (Numbers 1, 3-13). The stickers were lightly placed on the inside of each of the eggs. I wanted them to be easy to remove from the eggs. I also wanted the stickers to have enough stickiness left on them to stick to the missing number math sheet.

Hint:
If you wanted to, you could have this activity in a center! You could have the eggs already in an Easter basket instead of having an Easter egg hunt. Once kids are finished with the activity, they could place a new set of stickers into the Easter eggs for the next person.

It will be up to you to decide how difficult you want to make it to find the eggs. For our Easter egg hunt I kept it really easy. My son was able to collect the eggs easily and get started with the second part of the activity in no time.

Here are some of the ways children could complete the second part of the Easter egg hunt activity:

Children could come up with the missing numbers for each of the number facts and write in the numbers. They could then open each of the eggs and search for that number. Once they have found that number, they could put it on top of their handwritten number.
Children could open one egg at a time and search for the missing number blank that that number would fill.
Children could open all of the eggs and place the number stickers on the outside of its egg. They could decide what number they needed for the first number sentence and place the number sticker in the missing number space. Children could go down one column and then the other.

I have just shared a few ways that you could do both parts of this activity. I bet you can come with a number of unique twists you can add to them to make them your own. If you do, please leave me a comment below or leave me a comment on my Facebook page.

If you are looking for some more learning based Easter activities, you will want to check out the following activities.

Cool Math for Kids- Easter Egg Learning

Dolch Sight Words- Unscrambling Eggs

Carrot Number Writing Activity

How to Make Spider Web Eggs

Making Learning Fun with Rainbows

March 9, 2015 By Deirdre

Somewhere over, under, and on rainbow children can explore learning concepts. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet arranged in arcs just seem perfect for activities and games. I have shared a number of rainbow learning activities. Several other blogs have shared amazing ways of making learning fun with rainbows too. I thought I would shared twelve activities for kids. They cover a wide variety of concepts. They are all hands on and most importantly they all look like fun.

I hope you will take a few moments to explore each of them. If you find some that you really love, please take a moment to leave them a comment or to pin them to your Pinterest boards. I have already pinned all of them to my Early Learning board.

Making Learning Fun Activities

The Measured Mom Sight Word Learning Game

This game works on color words. After kids have read a color word card, they move a space a rainbow path on a game board. I really love this free printable game!

Rainbow Letter Sound Game from Mom Inspired Life

Children roll a die to find out how many colored circles featuring various alphabet letters they may walk on. They have to share the letter they landed on.

Magazine Color Search to Craft a Rainbow

This one of my making learning fun with rainbows activities. Children search through magazines for many of the colors of the rainbow. They arrange magazine cutouts in those colors on the correct arc to create a rainbow.

Rainbow Sight Word Painting from True Aim

Various colors of the rainbow watercolors can be painted over sight words written with crayon. You really need to see this activity. It looks like so much fun.

Rainbow Lacing Busy Bag from Coffee Cups and Crayons

This is an awesome fine motor busy bag activity. Children will love weaving various rainbow colors to create beautiful rainbows.

Learning 4 Kids

A rainbow salt tray like the one shared in a post by Learning 4 Kids would be great for working on letter and number writing. It would also be wonderful for just exploring fine motor skills.

Fine Motor Gold Coin Jumping a Rainbow Game

This game is a lot like Tiddly Winks. Children try to leap gold coins from circle with various colored sections into a pot of gold.

Rainbow File Folder Game

This open ended game board could be used to review sight words, math facts or science questions. Any subject could be reviewed as children travel up a rainbow path to get to the pot of gold.

Creating a Rainbow By Measuring from Gift of Curiosity

Children get to review their measurement skills as they create arcs for a rainbow. You will love the printables that she has created for kids to use for this activity.

Magnetic Letter Rainbow from Fantastic Fun and Learning

Magnetic Letters and metal tray are an invitation to making learning fun. Children are invited to complete the rainbow started with a single row of colored letters.

{Printable} Writing Sight Words on a Rainbow

This is a set free printables I created for my son to use to practice writing his sight words. Children write and rewrite their sight words across one of the rainbow’s arcs.

Rainbow Retelling Bracelet from Reading Book By Book

Each bead on this rainbow bracelet invites a child to share a different aspect of a story. What a wonderful retelling activity!

If you make any of these ideas for making learning fun, please leave me a comment below telling me about it or share a picture of it on my Facebook page.

Kindergarten Worksheets- Gold Coin Number Mats

March 1, 2015 By Deirdre

$Kindergarten-Worksheets-Gold-Coin-Math-Mats.$

Gold coins are great to use for counting pirate or leprechaun treasure. We got a whole bunch of them to use in a pirate vowel drop game this summer. Those same gold coins were used to count and add on using the gold coin number work mats on this kindergarten worksheets I created. It is great when things can be used in multiple activities.

Young children may use the mats and the coins to count up to the number displayed on each mat. While they could just count the yellow circles on each mat, I thought it would be fun to work with gold coin on the mats. That way children could work on one to one correspondence as they counted on the mat.

$Kindergarten-Worksheets-Gold-Coin-Math-Mats.$

Hint:

Our coins were on the large side. You want to use smaller Gold Coins for this activity.

Ways to Use These Kindergarten Worksheets

$Kindergarten Worksheets- Gold Coin Math Mats$

My son is in first grade. He is currently working on addition facts. I had him select a math flashcard from a pile of homemade flashcards. He had to put the first number in his head. Then he had to select the mat that displayed the second number. Finally he counted on that number using coins.

A second addition game we played with these mats had both of us working with a mat. I selected a mat and counted up to the number displayed on it. My son selected a mat and added his number to mine by counting on.

If you have a lot of coins you could line up all the numbered kindergarten worksheets featuring gold coin numbers in number order on the floor. Children could take turns adding coins to the numbers as they counted up to ten.

Hint:

We didn’t laminate or cover out mats with contact paper. If you are using them with multiple children in a classroom or homeschool setting you may want to cover them. $Kindergarten Worksheets- Gold Coin Math Mats$

If you click on the link below, you can print out your own set of kindergarten worksheets with gold coin numbers.

Gold Coin Counting Mats (PDF)

Here are some other St. Pattys Day activities for kids:

{Printable} Roll and Color St. Patrick’s Day Pages

Creating a Snack with Leprechaun Magic Dust

Creating a Rainbow Place Mat

If you do try any of the above St. Patrick’s Day activities, please leave me a comment below telling me about it or share a picture of it on my Facebook page

Doctor Seuss Math Game- Lorax Adding

February 20, 2015 By Deirdre

$doctor seuss math game lorax adding with file folder$

The Lorax is one of our favorite Doctor Seuss books. One year for Doctor Seuss’ birthday (March 2nd) I made JDaniel a Lorax lunch. This year I made a fun file folder game with the Lorax for JDaniel. We used this game space to work on addition facts. It could be used to work on a wide variety of skills. I will walk you through how we used it for addition and then share with you other ways to use this Lorax folder work space.

$Doctor Seuss Math Game- Lorax Adding$

Addition Version of the Game

The Lorax is up in arms about the demise of the truffula trees. When it came to deciding what hands on manipulative to use for counting, I decided we had to use pom-poms. They look like the top of the truffula trees.

Each of the Lorax’s whiskers would be a work space used to display each of the numbers in the number sentence. The works spaces were made large so that manipulatives for large addition facts would fit in them.

$Doctor Seuss Math Game- Lorax Adding$

We used the homemade flashcards I made to review addition facts with JDaniel. (If you have store bought flashcards, that are horizontal they would work too.) We tried to center the cards so the plus sign was right under the Lorax’s nose and each of the numbers lined up under one of the whiskers. If you make a Doctor Seuss Lorax math game, you may decide to make a circle with a plus sign to place right on the Lorax’s nose. It might help your children visualize the fact.

Once the number sentence is displayed, one of us came up with the sum. My son was the one finding the sum, but we would have taken turns if he was just learning how to add.

Other Ways to this Doctor Seuss Themed Work Space

Find the Fact

Two people can play this game.One person displays the math fact on the Lorax and the other person searches through a stack of index card to find its match. The opposite of this can be done to. One person can select a card and read out the number fact. The second person can illustrate the fact with the pom-poms. One or both of the children can figure out the sum.

Speed Game

A timer can be set for two minutes. Then a child can try to display and count as many sums as they can. Why use the pom-poms when working on speed? The pom-poms can help children visualize a number sentence and sum.

Subtracting

Children can use the Doctor Seuss Lorax work space to work on subtraction facts. Children can take turns calling out and displaying subtraction facts or using flashcards.

$Doctor Seuss Math Game- Lorax Adding$

Here are some other Doctor Seuss Learning Activities We Have Done:

Fox in Sox Retelling Puppet

The Tooth Book Sensory Bin

Doctor Seuss Thing One and Thing Two Shape Craft

Cat in the Hat Math Mat (Free Printable)

If you do try any of the above Doctor Seuss activities, please leave me a comment below telling me about it or share a picture of it on my Facebook page .

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Building Blocks Activity- Creating Shamrocks

February 18, 2015 By Deirdre

It is amazing how ways you can use building blocks. My son and have created water parks and tall buildings with them. Recently I challenged him to help me create shamrock silhouettes and then select matching building blocks to place on them. We found that the blocks needed to be rotated to get silhouettes that looked close to shamrocks.

Creating Building Blocks Shamrocks

Exploring Ways to Make Shamrocks

The link below is an affiliate link.

We started by taking out a bag of small Melissa & Doug 100-Piece Wood Blocks Set.(The blocks found on this link are not the same as ours, but would be great for this activity.) Then I issued the following challenge to both of us (Yes, I issued the directions to myself.):

Find as many ways as you can to make shamrocks using the blocks.
Each shamrock does not need to be made up of blocks of the same shape or color.
The shapes can’t overlap.

Creating the Shamrocks on Construction Paper

After creating four different shamrocks, I traced the building blocks silhouettes on to green paper to be cut out. Several layers of green paper were placed under the outlines so that more than one shape could be built at a time. When the shapes had been cut out they were glued onto a piece of orange paper. ( The Irish flag is green, white and orange.)I thought it would have this part of the activity display two of the flag’s colors.

Duplicating the Silhouettes with Blocks

For young children just placing the blocks in the correct position would be a challenge. My son is in first grade so I asked him to find the right shapes and then really think about how to display them. He needed to make sure that he selected a chose a different design to display for each block. ( His blocks have unique designs on each side.) This wasn’t possible to do with the red cylinder blocks.

Hint: If your blocks don’t have different designs on each side, you could place different stickers on each of the side. The stickers could have a St. Patrick’s Day theme.

Discussing the Blocks Shape

My son has just finished a unit on 3-D shapes at school. We took a few moments to talk about what 3-D each block was. We also talked about what flat shapes that each shape was made up of.

Many Layers of Learning While Block Building:

As we completed all the steps in this block building activity we worked on the following skills:
Visual discrimination (Placing the blocks in to shamrock shapes.)
Fine Motor Skills (Moving , Tracing, Cutting, and Gluing Shapes)
Analyzing what side of a block to use.

Here are some more shape activities:

Dr. Seuss Thing One and Thing Two Shape Activity

Shape Sheep

LEGO Shapes- Open and Closed Polygons

Shapes in a Sandwich

Sides and Vertices Aliens

If you do try any of the above geometry practice activities, please leave me a comment below telling me about it or share a picture of it on my Facebook page .

Open and Closed LEGO Polygon Shapes

February 13, 2015 By Deirdre

Earlier in this week I shared a really cool LEGO fraction activity we did over the weekend and I bet you thought I might just be sharing a few more fraction activities. Well, they will come late. ( Yes, I do have a few more.) Just before we started working on fractions we explored some of the geometric concepts he was working on. I shared with you a LEGO activity and an alien craft that we did at home to support those geometry concepts. Somehow the exploration of open and closed polygon shapes slipped through the cracks. I thought it would be a great post to share with you today.

Open and Closed Shape Hockey

It was important that we not just build open and closed polygon shapes using the many LEGO we have. Interacting with the shapes by exploring them was really important.

We started by building some shapes that were open and closed with LEGO. They did not have to big shapes, but they did need to big enough to hold the button we were going to use for the hockey game.

Once the polygon shapes were created, we tested out played the hockey game. The goal of the game was to flick, push, or move a button with an ice cream spoon without having it lift off the table.

The button could be placed right beside the opening or on the other side of the table. The goal was not to see if we could get the button in the shape with one move. The goal was to slip the button into the open shapes.

Why Did We Explore Polygon Shapes This Way?

Wait a Minute! Can’t you just see that polygon shapes are open or closed? Yes, you sure can! The purpose of this activity is for children to place in the visual and muscle memory information that will help them remember the concepts.

We could have simply drawn open and closed polygon shapes or worked on a worksheet on the concept. My son and many other children seem to learn best through exploring math concepts with their hands. They seem to own the information and can picture it long after they have worked on it.

That is why we built a LEGO graphing workspace, fraction workspace and worked on side and vertices riddles with LEGO. That is why we have been working with all kinds of learning concepts with his hands since he was very little.

Here are some other LEGO learning activities we have done:

LEGO Fraction Games

Geometry Riddles Solved with LEGO

Valentine Ideas – Graphing with Candy Hearts and LEGO

If you do try any of the above LEGO learning activities, please leave me a comment below telling me about it or share a picture of it on my Facebook page.

Lego Fraction Games for Kids

February 8, 2015 By Deirdre

During the last few weeks, I have shared geometry activities that focused on vertices and sides. JDaniel got make geometry aliens and explore geometry riddles with LEGO at home to re-enforce the skills he was working on at school. If he was working on geometry at school and it made sense to review those concepts at home. Now he is moving on to fractions at school so, we have moved on to them too. Today’s activity uses LEGOS to play fraction games.

Disclaimer:
We have tons of LEGOS at home! (So many LEGO that I made him a special LEGO storage bucket.) We are using them a lot to review and learn skills. If you have tons of blocks, you might want to use them for this activity instead.

How We Put the Workspace Together:

Supplies

Base plate
A lot of 1×8 LEGOS
A lot of 1×4 LEGOS
Index cards
Magic Marker

The link below is an affiliate link.

Tip:

We accumulated a lot of LEGO by purchasing an assortment of LEGO Classic Large Bricks

Steps

We created six towers using three 1×8 in each.
The three towers were placed in two rows.
A single 1×8 was placed two rows in front of each tower.
This created an index card display space.
With the workspace completed I wrote various fractions of small pieces of index cards.

Playing the Fraction Games

I laid the fraction cards out on the kitchen table along with a bowl of 1×4 LEGOS. JDaniel was asked to select a fraction and place in it a cardholder. Then he was asked to display that fraction.

He chose to display some of the fractions horizontally and some vertically. We talked about how it really didn’t matter how the LEGOS were displayed. What mattered was that they displayed the right fraction!

Fraction Game Alternatives

After he had finished the two rows of fractions, he decided that it would be fun to build the fraction and have me find its fraction card.

This would be fun for two children to play or an adult and child as we did.

Here are several more fraction game ideas we tried out:

First, you can create vertical fractions.

We displayed our fractions flat on the base plate. Children could display the fractions in towers if they like. There really isn’t a wrong way to play these fraction games.

Second, you can create an opposite fraction.

After we created the fraction displayed in bricks based on the card, we talked about what the other fraction displayed. The first fraction displayed in the first row of this picture showed three-fifths of the bricks as blue, but what fraction was displayed by the red bricks? It displayed a fraction of two fifths.

Third, you can work on reducing fractions.

If you had a larger base plate to work with, you could work on larger fractions. If you worked on larger fractions, you could then talk about reducing the fractions to their lowest terms.

JDaniel noticed that one half and two-fourths were the same when we worked on building the fractions. The LEGO fraction display made it easier to see that relationship. I think working with bigger fractions will do that with many fractions.

Fourth, you can call the color of the numerator.

If you are ready to go into numerators and denominators, children could be asked to display the top number in a specific color. The remaining bricks could be different colors or all the same of any color but the one used for the top color.
JDaniel pointed out that to me with he was working on fractions. If was a great time to introduce “big kid” math words.

If you like this LEGO activity, here are some more LEGO learning activities:

Three Blind Mice STEM Activity- LEGO Braille Alphabet

Ocean Themed Counting Sheets

$Math is Fun-Valentine's Day LEGO Graphing -Adding red bars$
LEGO Graphing

If you do try any of the above fraction games, please leave me a comment below telling me about it or share a picture of it on my Facebook page.

Math Solver-Geometry Riddles Solved with LEGOS

January 30, 2015 By Deirdre

$Math Solver- Geometric Riddles Solved with LEGOS$

I shared with you early this week a craft activity we did for geometry practice. Today I want to share with you another learning activity that works on the same geometric concept. This activity starts with reading shape riddles and ends with children creating the shape described in the riddle.

Children could easily draw the shape described in the riddle with crayon or markers. My son is really into LEGO so; I had him built each shape using LEGO.

It took a little time to sift through all of his many LEGOS to find the ones we would be using for this project. I shift through them while watching television one night. You may want to have your children do the shifting for the bricks. If you do, you may want to set out examples of what they need to look for or place pictures of what they need to find beside your brick bin. It would be like going on a treasure hunt.

Here are the bricks we used:

Red 2×2 bricks
Red 1×1 bricks
Long narrow bricks with one row or two $Math Solver- Geometric Riddles Solved with LEGOS$

The red bricks will be used for the corners or vertices. My thought was that using the same color for the corners was important. Using the same color for the sides didn’t seem as important. You may decide that it is important to the long sides of a rectangle the same color and short sides of it the same color. It may turn out not to be important to you, but it is important to your child as they work as a math solver.

Once you have bricks that you need, you are ready to put out the geometric shape riddles. When I was putting the riddle cards together, I was torn as to what terms to use for the sides and corners. I read through several primary grades state standards and common core goal sites. Some used the term corners and a lot called them vertices. Some sites said that shapes had side while others said that had edges. I went with the words vertices and sides.

$Math Solver- Geometric Riddles Solved with LEGOS$

If you use the other terms or totally different terms, you may not want to download my set of shape riddles. It would be totally easy to look at the layout of my cards and create cards of your own for your math solver.

$Math Solver- Geometric Riddles Solved with LEGOS$

Here are some other geometric learning activities we have done that your math solver and explorer may enjoy:

Shapes in a Sandwich

Geometric Alien Craft

Shape Sheep

If you do try this activity with your kids, please leave me a comment below telling me about it or share a picture of it on my Facebook page.

Geometry Practice- Sides and Vertices Aliens

January 26, 2015 By Deirdre

I never dreamt that JDaniel would come home with a math homework that asked him to find the vertices of each shape on the page. He is first grade! I knew he was working on geometry last week, but I thought he would be focusing on shape identification. This past weekend I crafted some shape aliens. I wanted for us to have a learning activity that gave him geometry practice with finding the vertices and sides of each shape.

Using the sample sides and vertices aliens I made he will then create his own shape aliens this week.. He can pick the shape he wants to focus on and cut it out. Then I can walk him through adding the side and vertex indicators.

As I thought through the steps he would need and the skills he would work on, I came up with a lot. This activity covers several math and fine motor skills.

What are they?

Measuring
Cutting
Counting
Pincher Practice
Pencil Gripping

Let me walk you through how this geometry practice activity is done.

First you will need to measure the length of each of the sides and cut out construction paper strips for each of the sides. You can measure each length with a ruler and the mark that measurement on paper. You could line the edge of your shape on construction paper, mark its length and then cut out a strip that length.

When you have all the side strips cut out, you can glue then onto the edges of the strip. Each strip represents one of the shapes sides or edges. The strips may need to be trimmed to fit their shape perfectly. You could have your children count around the edges from 1 to the last numbered edge of the shape. They could write the number for each side on the side if you like.

Then you will use a pincher grip to pick on a pompom and rub it in glue. One pompom will go in each of the vertices.

With the geometric practice completed it will then time to add facial features to your alien. I think I will precut the antennae and feet for JDaniel. You may decide you want to have your children cutout the antennae and feet for their alien. We will be using construction paper, but I think pipe cleaners or foam would be fun to use too.

We will be using sparkly star stickers for the alien’s nose along with wiggly eyes as I did in the sample aliens for geometric practice. You could easily have your children hand draw the alien’s faces. The alien’s mouth will be drawn on.

We will be displaying our aliens for geometric practice so we can review the number of sides and vertices each of the shapes have.

I concentrated on three basic shapes for this project. Octagons, pentagons, trapezoids, and rhombuses might be fun to try too. Oh! You might want to do a triangle study and have your children create equilateral, right, or isosceles triangles. You early childhood learner may be working on them too.

Here are some other geometric practice activities we have done:

Shape Sheep

Back to School Shape Craft

Dr. Seuss Shape Activity

If you do try any of the above geometry practice activities, please leave me a comment below telling me about it or share a picture of it on my Facebook page.

Math is Fun- Valentine’s Day LEGO Graphing

January 24, 2015 By Deirdre

$Math is Fun-Valentine's Day LEGO Graphing -Adding red bars$

LEGO can be used to build all kinds of things like story characters and science tools. We recently used them to work on an activity I am calling Math is Fun- Valentine’s Day LEGO Graphing. My son and I built a graphing base plate using some of the oodles of bricks he has in his room. We were able to use our LEGO graphing base plate to create bar graph and a picture graph that displayed results gathered while counting the candy in a Valentine’s treat box.

$Math is Fun-Valentine's Day LEGO Graphing -Adding red bars$

Hints for creating a LEGO graphing space:

If you don’t have a lot of long white bricks like 2×8’s , you can uses maller bricks

We created wide columns. It made it easy to add the bricks to their column on the graph and to remove them.

We used a 10×10 base plate to create our graph. If you have one larger that would be great, but we found this size base plate worked really well.

$Math is Fun- Valentine's Day Lego Graphing$

The links below are affiliate links.

The candy from the box was sorted by color and placed intocandy brix heart shaped silicone muffin cups . You could just place them in a pile beside the graph if you like. We sorted them so we could then count them. I wanted to make sure we would have enough of each of the colors of candy in bricks.

Before we started graphing we gathered bricks that sort of matched the colors of the candy in the box. The bricks were placed in a Valentine’s Dayheart cupcake tins. My son suggested that we place a colored brick in each of the colors at the bottom of each of the columns so, we would know what column to put each color in. I thought that was a great idea! We could not find enough 4×2 for each color so we combined smaller bricks together to equal a 4×2.)

Starting To Graph

With everything organized we were ready to start our math is fun graphing activity. We started by displaying the bricks for each color to create a bar graph. Each candy color was recounted as we went. You may decide to add a step to this activity. We did not record the number of each color of hearts that we had on a chart before you start.Thus we had to recount the candies.

We found that there were so many green and blue candies that we have to continue bar graph off the edge of the base plate. It actually looked kind of cool!

Math is Fun- Valentine's Day Lego Graphing

Then we created a picture graph using the candy hearts. We talked about how the hearts would need to be stacked the same way in each column to clearly display the data. Actually they really could be displayed anyway your kids want them to be.

$Math is Fun-Valentine's Day LEGO Graphing -Adding red bars$

Once we had finished the display we talked over the answers to the following questions.

Which column has more?
Which column has less?
Which columns could be combined to come up with as many candies as the column with the most?

$Math is Fun-Valentine's Day LEGO Graphing -Adding red bars$

Here are some more math is fun activities:

Printable Math Fact Fortune Teller

Apple Seed Counting

Plastic Jug Flip Chute

Planet Math Fact Bounce

Here are some more LEGO learning activities:

How long will your boat float?

Over in the Meadow LEGO Creations and Book

LEGO Count and Move ( Free Printable)

$Math is Fun-Valentine's Day LEGO Graphing$
If you try this Math is Fun-LEGO Valentine’s Graphing activity, please leave me a comment below telling me about it or share a picture of it on my Facebook page.