St. Patrick’s Day is a great time to break out of the mold and use fun manipulatives to practice math. This means doing fun activities to accomplish your Common Core standards. These ideas can be tweaked to meet your standards using the same materials and I’ll give you a primary and upper elementary example. Bring the Lucky Charms, gold coins and rainbow into your St. Patrick’s day and you’ll even have a bulletin board display for April when you’re through.
Patterns & Lucky Charms
Using the famous cereal, create patterns that fit your standards onto strips of construction paper. This fun activity means that your students can eat the left over materials {love edible math!} and still have a product to show their thinking. This works great with problem solving because there are plenty of manipulative pieces – enough for a whole class.
Primary Example:
Tip! Write your objective onto the cloud to turn this activity into a display.
Upper El Example:
Students can use the cereal pieces to begin their exploration and determine the pattern. They can then switch to setting up a table or using pictures and equations to find their solution.
Pot of Gold – What’s Missing?
Finding missing addends plays a role throughout the elementary grade levels. Make simple equation or story task cards and create a black pot or sneaky leprechaun hat pocket from construction paper. Use chocolate gold coins and you’re got the perfect setting for problem solving! Working in pairs, students can swipe coins like a sneaky leprechaun and hide them in their leprechaun hat, or always get more for addition from the pot of gold. Depending upon your goals, you’ve got a fun, themed foundation to work from.
If you’re working into double digit numbers and beyond you can use gold bars to represent tens or hundreds and keep the coins to represent ones. Making it manipulative makes it fun! What about extending it and having them create their own version for someone else to solve? It doesn’t end there – go back to the famous lucky cereal and you’ve got the perfect manipulatives for composing and decomposing numbers.
I was trying to think outside the box when creating these activities to incorporate standards I want to practice in my own classroom. I hope it can help you feel like you can bring the fun activities into your classroom for St. Patrick’s day too. Have your own St. Patrick’s day activity? We’d love to see it! Share today by joining the Teach Junkie community.
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Leslie {aka the original Teach Junkie} loves learning new things to make teaching easier and more effective. She enjoys featuring creative classroom fun when she's not designing teacher shirts, making kindergarten lesson plans or planning her family's next trip to Disney World.