The Wonderful World of Manipulatives

October 17, 2009

A great quiet activity that also involves math is to break open our tub of manipulatives.

This is our tub for my Pre-K adorables and it includes 70 or so counting bears, addition cards and 5 sorting cups.

The first activity, obviously, is to sort the counting bears into the 5 different colors. (It’s bothering me that some of the purples look blue. They really are purple, just a different shade).

Next we count them.

Then out comes the addition cards…

We arrange all of our little counting bears on them.

Then we count some more to check our totals.

After that, and because my adorables are boys, we line up all 70 of the counting bears into 2 armies and shoot cannons at them and watch them fly all over the place (I’m sorry I don’t have a shot of this).

Afterward, we count them one last time to make sure we haven’t lost any forever and put them back into the tub and pretend we hadn’t just wagered major carnage.

But hopefully there was some math in there somewhere.

You might like...

Category: Activities
Tags: manipulatives, math |

6 Comments »

marla
on October 17, 2009 8:30 am
I love the war at the end. You have to provide a picture!!!!
Whitney Trujillo
on October 17, 2009 10:37 am
What a great activity! I can just picture the war at the end. You have to switch it up a bit, you know!
Julie
on October 18, 2009 8:59 am
This reminds me of trying to teach Attie positions in soccer. I drew a “field” on plywood and used his army guys as the players with one team wearing pink yarn around their necks like boas. The army guys were so humiliated! =)
Lucy
on October 18, 2009 4:19 pm
These are great, where did you get them?
Melissa Taylor
on October 18, 2009 6:04 pm
Love it! (You know me.)

Try patterns with the colors, too! And, if you have different sized bears, sort by size —

Great post!

Melissa
Shanay
on July 24, 2010 10:41 pm
Please let me know where I can purchase this manipulatives< I want to use them for my students in my classroom