Thursday, February 19, 2009

1,2,3 Learn with Me Thursday: Conversation Heart Math

For my first installment of math related activities I'm sharing in greater depth one of the activities we did at the Valentine play date. I'm sorry if this seems a bit like a repeat of yesterday's post, but we were so busy getting ready for Tuesday's play date, that I just couldn't squeeze in one more new thing for her to try and photograph.

Remember, next week I'll have a linky up for you to join in on Teach me Tuesday and 123 Learn with Me Thursday. Don't forget to check out the activity for today at Katie's A Listmaker's Life.

Conversation Heart Math

This simple math activity can be adapted so it can be used year round. M&M and Skittles candies are a good edible manipulatives to use. Activities that incorporate food, especially the sweet kind are always highly motivating to children!

Learning Objective: To sort and graph by color, counting
Materials: color board, graph paper or paper chart, conversation hearts or small colored candies.Procedure:
Before beginning activity: make a color board by tracing circles on a sheet of paper with colored markers that coordinate with the colors of the candy you are using. You may want to color in the circles and/or write the color word inside of each circle. I have also made these with construction paper die cut circles.

Give your child a color board and candy conversation hearts. Hold up one at a time and ask your child to identify its color by name or say the color word aloud. Place that candy heart in the correct circle.

Have your child contine to sort the candies until they are all gone.
Count how many of each color you have.

This is where I would end the lesson for my two and a half year old daughter. For more advanced learners I'd provide a color graph. I made mine on MS Word by creating a graph, the cute heart font is by DJ Doodlers.Have you child graph how many of each color he or she has.

Extension Activity for a Classroom or Small Group: To reinforce the concepts measurement and comparison vocabulary such as: more, less, greatest, least, etc. and to practice graphing in my classroom we would then make a graph of the whole classes results.

I would have little colored paper squares prepared ahead of time. Each child would take get the color square that represented the color he or she had the most or the fewest. Then one at a time students would come up and speak in a complete sentence using comparative vocabulary. For example: ___ was the color I had the greatest of and ___ was the color I had the least of. I was a stickler for speaking in a complete sentence and not just coming up and mumbling, "Green," or something along those lines. They'd add their colored square to our cooperative graph, and after everyone had a turn, we'd read our chart and come up with descriptions such as, "The greatest number of students more pink candy hearts than any other color."

If there was time I might also include some whole class writing by using my easel pad of paper and having us write out our descriptions together. This consisted mainly of us deciding what to say, the class helping me write it by coming up with the letter words begin or end with, and some of the students coming up to "share the pen" and write the initial or ending letters. But shared writing is another and complete lesson in and of itself, so I won't go into too much detail now.

2 Friends Said:

Shelby said...

Great idea!!! I am so excited about ABC...123 - can't wait to see more from "The Katie's"

Shonda said...

I'm going to do this activity with my son! He's just two, but I love this idea of color sorting!

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