Math Activities

Math is a great subject to use hands-on materials with students. Math allows students to learn through exploration. I use a variety of items for math depending on the subjects we are learning. Here are some of my favorites to use and some activities that I find my students not only enjoy doing but benefit from.

• Graphing-we do graphing throughout the year in kindergarten.We do lots of hands on graphing revolving around seasonal and holiday items. Some examples include February-conversation hearts, March-Lucky Charms April-Jelly beans.
• Sorting-for sorting activities we use the above items before we graph them and many more. I use novelty erasers a lot to sort as well as blocks, plastic bugs, animals, beads, and money (this is a great for sorting by size, color and value which also teaches the basics of identifying money).
• One to One corresponding-in the beginning of kindergarten we work on matching the correct number of items to a number. I use a variety of techniques to help students learn this skill. One activity is using an ice cube tray write a numerals inside the tray and have students put that many beads, beans or other item into each compartment. This can also be done with egg cartons.
• Patterns-my students enjoy creating patterns with uni fix cubes and pattern blocks but I like to add in other items to extend their skills. I use plastic beads and strings to allow students to create pattern necklaces, fruit loops strung on yarn into patterns and dyed pasta strung on yarn. These also help with fine motor skills for students.
• Shapes-most students come to kindergarten able to recognize basic 2-D shapes. In order to get them to be able to describe and identify the shapes we do several activities. Some of those are creating shapes with toothpicks and marshmallows, creating shapes on geoboards with rubber bands or using straws and pipe cleaners to create shapes.

These are just some of the activities I do with my students to reinforce their math skills. I try to use a variety of hands on materials to keep them interested and motivated to learn.