Three Math Activities for the Christmas Season

You can spread a little holiday cheer in your winter math lessons.  There are a ton of ideas out there to enliven math class during the last few days of the semester, and get everyone in the mood for Christmas.

• Create Christmas trees in the cute coordinate graphic activity.  This teacher had a wonderful winter bulletin board full of these decorated Christmas trees and fireplaces.  It's a good way to have them practice graphing as well as making their own artwork.
• How acute is students' spatial intelligence?  Test it out with this Snowflake Math Activity, which challenges them to anticipate which design will result from cuts on piece of paper.  It's taking the handy old paper snowflake technique and making it much more complex.
• Speaking of snowflakes, have you ever heard of a 6-Sided Kirigami Snowflake?  MathCraft shows you how to make one.  They are signed to reflect the hexagonal symmetry of real snowflakes.  Picture tutorial included.

Have you seen more math lessons that are great for this time of year?

Time-Telling Games

A few websites offer practice with telling time and reading clocks:

• Students can Stop The Clock and record the time displayed. 
• Can they tell the difference between two times?  Test their skills by playing another game on the same website. 
• They can also play Bang on the Clock to stop the clock at the correct time.  Adjust the clock hands' speed to make it more challenging.

Three Hands-On Geometry Activities

Turn geometry lessons into creative opportunities for students to learn while they build, manipulate and create.  I found three cool resources for hands-on geometry activities that you might like to add to workstations, your classroom project roster, or enrichment lessons. 

• A great place to start for geometry activities is the MathCraft Wiki Page, which has dozens of projects that explore geometric principles.  Many of the suggestions there are eye-catching and complex, so this would be a good resource for gifted students.  Help students strengthen their spatial intelligence by challenging them to create icosahedral planet ornaments, these cool and colorful paper polyhedra, fractal cupcakes or any number of the ideas listed on the site.  Each project contains a step-by-step tutorial.

• Miss Calculate posted this geometry sort on her blog, which helped her students work with triangles, bisectors, medians, etc.  I'm a big fan of sorting!  She asked her students to take their cards and sort them into piles.  Later, after they came up with a different number of piles, she explained that they should have five piles.  She then had them place their cards under the correct labels.  Geometry lesson with no paper and pencil required!

• Construct a tetrahedral kite using little more than straws, a string and some tape.  This includes a step-by-step guide with photos.

3 Algebra Activities for Beginners

Turning algebra practice into engaging activities is sometimes a hard task.  Thankfully, a few places offer work your students can do to enhance their math skills without staring at a math textbook or worksheet.

Mrs. W's Math Connection showed her students that they can make "edible equations" by solving their equations in the form of burgers.  She displayed their yummy-looking algebra sandwiches as a classroom display. 

Her class also created their own water parks as a means of working with slope and linear equations.  Check out her class working on their ideas and their finished projects, which look awesome!  The project is available for free on a TeachersPayTeachers site!

There is also Vector Kids' Online Variable Game, which challenges students with basic algebraic questions to solve for "x."  They can choose which operation to use and how high their problems can go.  How many can they solve in one minute?

Math Activities with Pattern Blocks

Pattern blocks are helpful tools to create a plethora of hands-on math activities.  As I've noticed as a sub, pattern blocks are not just for students in first grade and below (as I previously assumed).  Activities with pattern blocks can be adapted to fit a wide range of skills and difficulty, strengthening geometric reasoning and spatial awareness.  Here are some activities and games students can enjoy:

• The Last Block is a 2-4 player game that challenges students to be the last player to place a block on the gameboard.  You can use this as a board for the pattern block game.
• FirstGradeParade adapted Musical Chairs into a game where students added blocks to the patterns created by other students.  This is a great way to get students up and moving while practicing with patterns!
• MathLearningCenter has free pattern block lesson plans to download and use in class.  Activities are suited for K-2 students.
• MarcialMiller lists several games and activities using pattern blocks.  Ideas include everything from working with tessalations, fractions, and making pictures of animals and flowers.

3 Books for Read-Alouds and Activities

Take a look at these terrific, tried-and-true children's books that are perfect for read-alouds and centers.  These 3 books are ones I have either read to classes or seen kids enjoy independently, and I've found websites that also recommend the same books and include activities you can complete after reading.

Dodger and Me  by Jordan Sonnenblick is a nice chapter book to devote to read-alouds, and Yearn4Learning's class considers it a favorite.  She has posted a chapter-by-chapter reading response packet to go along with the book.    

 

A Bad Case Of Stripes by David Shannon, one of my favorite picture book writer/illustrators, is one I definitely have enjoyed reading to students.  StepIntoSecondGrade turned the book into a coloring and writing activity for her students, and she's shared it on her site!  Your class can color their own stripes on Camilla, the main character, and write about the cause and effect of events in the story. 

The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister is one of the most popular books I see in school libraries.  Kids love the cool illustrations, and I must admit that I love seeing the glittery images on the covers of the Rainbow Fish series.  That's why it was so exciting to see LearningParade's eye-catching craft activity designed around this book.  Students create a tissue paper lantern that closely resemble the colors associated with the popular book covers.  Students can also work on a cut/paste activity and color their own rainbow fish in this printable sheet from the site.

As an added bonus, check out MrsRojas's story maps made with post-it notes!  They are just the right size for a little story analysis for students.  She's even included a printable sheet to include information about different story elements.

Happy reading!



Teaching with Task Cards

Do you use task cards for teaching activities?  You may want to consider doing so when you observe all their benefits.

Task cards are pretty self-explanatory:  they are cards which contain tasks, or activities for students to complete.  Teachers usually create a deck of these task cards for students to practice skills.  They are good worksheet alternatives, can be adapted in to games, easy to make and readily accessible since so many teachers make and share them.

Here are some resources about task cards, if you're thinking about utilizing them:

• Task-Cards.com, which gives a thorough explanation for various ways to use task cards, including for individual, small group and whole class activities.  The site also provides details on several types of task cards and gives examples of each.  There are also four sets of free task cards as a sample of the type of material sold on the site.  Visit here for a one-stop shop for info on task cards! 
• Talbott's Teaching Trove contains a few sets of free task cards, including working with antonyms and rounding numbers.  My favorite are the "7-Up" cards, which encourage students to turn short, lifeless sentences into descriptive ones.
• The Third Wheel posted free math task cards to sharpen students' problem solving skills.
• Pro-Teacher.net forums have many awesome members who create and share task cards for all subjects and grade levels.  Sign up and join to share and contribute.