Easter Egg Math Activities

I am a firm believer in doing math activities that make kids feel like they aren’t doing math at all. So, seeing all the cute ways teachers are using easter eggs to help kids with literacy and math got me inspired to create some math eggs of my own for my daughter’s Preschool and my son’s kindergarten/1st grade classes.

Five-Wise Subitize!!

I LOVE subtilizing activities, but I really love ones that are Five-Wise. Five-Wise Subtizing groups the amount to be subitized into groups related to 5.

I also added in tally marks to the bottom of the egg carton for the kids to start relating the dot patterns, numeral, and tally marks. After my daughter played this the first time she told me I needed to make the 1,2,11, and 12…so I did, but I didn’t have any more pink and purple eggs so they ended up being orange and yellow.

Troublesome Teens

The words we use for our teen numbers do NOTHING to help kids understand the value of the numbers…if anything the words mess them up! Don’t get me started on ‘eleven’ and ‘twelve’ or even ‘thirteen’ and ‘fifteen’, but lets take one of the easy ones like “fourteen”…the 4 is said first, so all too often young kids will write it as “41.” These eggs are designed to help kids practice the “10 + something” facts, i.e. the teen numbers. I also threw in a few of those ‘turn-around’ numbers (41, 31, 21) to ensure the kids are really thinking about the problems because not all of them are the teen numbers.

Make 10 with Ten Frames

I saw photos of eggs that had the facts that Make 10, but it was just the equation. I thought the kindergarten class might find this version helpful because the ten frame gives them a visual to help them find all those combinations that make 10.

Place Value Practice

The first graders are working on place value and my son has been bringing home worksheets that ask “How many tens? How many ones?”…pretty much the typical place value activities. So, I decided to throw a little challenge at them thanks to what I learned reading Van de Walle’s book Teaching Student-Centered Mathematics. In the PreK-2 volume, he talks about mixing up the way we write place value tasks. Textbooks always give it to the kids in the order they need to write it (3 hundreds, 5 tens, 7 ones), which facilitates them just pulling out digits to write the number instead of thinking about their values. So, he suggests mixing up the order (5 tens, 7 ones, 3 hundreds) and also writing them, in what he calls Base Ten Riddles, like 2 hundreds, 14 tens, 17 ones (not as easy, huh??). Well, these 1st graders aren’t working in the hundreds, but I did decide to through in some Base Ten Riddles for 2-digit numbers as well as mixing up the order of how I wrote them on the eggs.