Hey Friends! I’m so excited to be linking up with the amazing Mrs. Wills Kindergarten for some ideas to create an hands on math lesson!

Hands On Ideas for Math

One of my favorite ways to teach place value is with this old and trusted flip chart. My students EVERY YEAR love this thing. Every year, I say “I could really update that and give it a new digital spin”….and yet I never do. Because it works and I love it. Plus, it’s been with me through all the moves and schools, since my very first year of teaching….;I might be a *bit* of a hoarder>>> haha! This is just an easy way to give students a visual of how to build a number. We’ve found that the ability to break apart and build numbers is the real foundation to number sense, not simply being able to recognize the numbers. Addition is another skill that we use a lot of manipulatives and hands on instruction. We are always counting objects. I have a few pictures on my SD card (that is with my husband for the moment) on how we use classroom objects for counting and applying numbers. I’ll update later in the week with those pictures! This next activity is a great way to get kiddos moving and using their hands to manipulate through the skills. Students should practice applying the skills they’ve learned in a variety of ways in order to retain the information they’ve learned. Sliders are a great way to practice addition skills while practicing math fluency at the same time. We finished learning about estimation a few months ago. We did a carnival theme and incorporated our math and english strands into our celebration. The kids had to practice estimating tickets, bouncy balls, animal crackers, and rubber ducks. Our parents sent some items in and the rest was purchased from the dollar store and Amazon! ! I. LOVE. THE. DOLLAR. STORE! You can get all of these games for free We are planning another one soon and I can’t wait to share it with you! This activity was so easy to prep and use! Just a simple fact toss ( remember what I said about the push for math fluency…. ) It’s amazing how much fun the kids have when you move a table and put paper on top! Simple ideas like rearranging your classroom furniture and adding elements can spark student engagement very easily! Remember how I told you I was a hoarder? A few years ago, I saved a bunch of bottle caps. I had no idea what I was going to use them for. We’ve had a big push in our district for math fact fluency lately, so I used this little mats. The students have different prompts to create number sentences. You can read more about that here. Another thing I like to do is periodically go through my game closet or stop at garage sales to find new ones. You can take just about ANY board game and make it into math game! I keep a pretty good stock of neon dot stickers. They peel off pretty easy and you can use them for so many different mathematical problems! My kiddos favorite right now is addition Jenga. It’s amazing what happens when you “throw” something at children! This beach ball was another dollar store find! We always see the beach ball reading games on them, so I thought why not make this apply for math? On this particular ball, I have numbers written in a ton of different ways. Expanded form, standard form, word from, groups of tens and ones and more! When the student catches the ball, they have to identify the numbers BOTH thumbs are on. I teach them to identify it in another way than the way they are seeing it on the ball! Talk about hands on math! This is a class favorite!

Math Task Cards

Math centers are so much easier with task cards. These task cards are a great way to practice math facts and build fluency. The great thing about task cards is that you can place them in different containers to add that extra spark! Multiplication task cards are one of my students favorites.