Here is a super easy activity to do with student who are learning multiplication. I use patterned paper or wrapping paper cut into 8.5 x 11. I place them in sheet protectors and students use wet erase markers to circle groups of a given number. In this example, groups of 4 are being circled. Then students write the equation. An example could be: 4 x 8 = 32. This is a great activity for younger students who are learning to…
Tying in pointillism are during a unit on fractions, decimals, and percents is perfect! How? It begins with painter Georges Seurat. Seurat was a post-impressionist painter who painted by placing tiny, preceise brush strokes of different colors close to one another so they blend at a distance. I share with the students his painting The Circus and we discuss the patience it probably took to paint the whole thing using tiny dots! I then pass out loupes and colored comics…
Mathematics and nature often go hand-in-hand. In this lesson, students study the spirals of the nautilus and tie it in to a numerical sequence called the Fibonacci sequence. They use the sequence to re-design the nautilus using home-made compasses. I begin the lesson by showing the first few terms of the Fibonacci sequence and have students work together to see if they can figure out the pattern and the next few numbers in the sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5,…
Ancient Africans in Egypt enlarged pictures by using nets of squares. In this fun project, students re-construct a smaller picture into a very large picture. In mathematics, we call this dilation which is a type of trasformation studied in geometry. This is an activity I do with fourth graders and above. I first begin with a picture that I know the students will have fun re-constructing. Hence…Sponge Bob. Depending on the number of students who will be working on one…
Partners traced each other’s feet. Then we used Unifix cubes to determine the area. (Partial squares got a little tricky but we did a little fraction work.) Then table teams grouped their Unifix into tens and ones for some place value practice. The kids LOVED that they got to take off their shoes. (Okay, there was one who wasn’t so keen on it…and there were a lot of laces that needed to be tied before recess!)