Hands-on learning is incredibly important for kids. There are a million reasons why! Today I am highlighting more than 60 elementary hands-on math teaching ideas that I have featured over the years on my site.
Looking for visuals to help your kids make sense of math? Grab this free set of printable math manipulatives for all the hands on resources your kids need.
Unifix cubes are interlinking cubes that are one of the best math manipulatives you can find. You can use the linking cubes individually for one to one correspondence and counting, or you can interlink the
Here's a simple way to teacher less than, greater than: with toys! Free printable included.
20 ideas for teaching shapes to young kids, including fantastic toys that promote shape learning.
Create a solid math foundation with these tips for teaching place value in 1st grade. Use these ideas to avoid place value mistakes!
Dominoes, number lines, online games, and much more.
Math art projects will get kids creative while also teaching them mathematical concepts. Fun ideas for children of all ages and skill levels.
Are you looking for a way teaching math vocabulary in a more visual and conceptual way? To differentiate for your struggling learners? Every year, it seems we get more and more visual learners coming into our classrooms, learners who benefit from math word walls that show concepts and vocabulary in action. This approach has worked wonders in my classroom and I know it will in yours! Adding a visual math word wall to my classroom completely changed how my students access our math vocabulary and the concepts we learn in class. Our math word walls are covered in examples and visuals that show the math concepts in context along with the vocabulary words we cover in class.
Playing with snap cubes can provide hours of entertainment for young ones. They will love using these mats to
Inside you'll find an easy step-by-step how to draw a Minecraft Self Portrait & Minecraft Coloring Page. Stop by and grab yours for free.
From making a graph paper "person" to making your own mosaic, here are creative ways to teach area and perimeter activities.
Build fact fluency with these engaging games and activities. Check out these super fun and creative ways to help your students stay engaged.
We wrapped up Friendship Week today. We did a lot of discussing what it means to do a friend and what are some fun/safe things you can do with your friend. I created this fun matching game to use in our sensory bin. I dyed some rice for the first time and it turned out perfect! It also reminded me of grass, so I found pictures of kids on the playground. On the cards I wrote words that describe what a good friend does, like share, help, kind, etc. Then, we picked a card, read the word, and discussed the word more. I added these fun "Buddy Builders" from Amazon and they were perfect "friends" for our park. This book is a great way to talk about the nice things our hands can do. Especially, if you have any kiddos who like to use their hands in an unsafe way ;) I also dyed noodles for the first time, too! We used those noodles to make friendship necklaces! We also used a bead kit for friendship bracelets :) Click on image to grab this bead kit! These peanut butter and jelly color matching cards were a huge hit! We played restaurant and worked together to serve the correct colors. I got these from The Homestead Teacher! Grab them HERE! We like to think of words that start with each letter. When we are out, we will see a letter and I always have to think of something that starts with that letter. It totally helps connect learning, so I made these "F is for friends!" page and we decorated the 'f' different supplies. For our play dough invitation, I printed off this cute friendship clip art set from Creative Clips! We put the friends in our play dough and pretended we were playing at the park! The last game we did was this fun math activity! We had to help the boy get to his friends by rolling our dice and counting each circle. It was a great way to practice some counting, number identification, and taking turns! Grab these activities HERE! *NOTE: the play dough friends are not included in this due to terms of use, but they are free for you to download HERE!
Take a look at number sense workstations for kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and place value workstations for third grade!
Geometric Art
Free Kindergarten Math Worksheets - Get kindergarten math coloring worksheets, missing numbers, additions and subtractions free worksheets!
Ready to make math centers work in shorter middle school class periods? Get the details - structure, scheduling, activities, and more!
Learn how to change a child's inflexible thinking with this collection of tips, books, and activities to develop a growth mindset for kids!
These FREE Printable Math Centers are perfect for K-5, Special Ed & Work Centers for students with Autism-15 Printable Activities & tips on differentiation!
So, yesterday I showed you how I got my angle studies kicked off with my students–how I solidified understanding of “right angle”. We had lots left to accomplish–so I’ll try to share some of the different lessons and activities we did over the next days! Tip 1: If you can get your hands on thin […]
Math and Art are no strangers, as these Math Art Activities for Kids show! Be ready to be mesmerized by how even Math can look gorgeous!
My students are always using and referring to different math tools during math centers. I created (and am sharing for free) individual math toolboxes.
A ton of free printable worksheets for kindergarten you'll love to use in your class or at home. Fun kindergarten worksheets to download!
How to plan collaborative project-based learning activities in the math classroom. Check out these engaging PBL ideas for 3rd grade students!
Are you looking for a way to work on first grade math skills? This free packet is for you! It could be used for learning in the classroom or at home! This packet works on
Yes! FREE homeschool math curriculum for K-8th grade does exist and it's wonderfully Charlotte Mason. Click, print, and done! Watch the video
A ton of free printable worksheets for kindergarten you'll love to use in your class or at home. Fun kindergarten worksheets to download!
A fun, processed based Fibonacci art project for kids. Great for S.T.E.A.M. learning at home or at school.
Practice grade 4 math with these FREE 4th Grade Math Worksheets and print as many as you need. Fourth grade math answer key included!!
My students are always using and referring to different math tools during math centers. I created (and am sharing for free) individual math toolboxes.
As a teacher, there is so much to do when it comes to setting up the classroom, that it is hard to know where to start! Over the course of my first six years of teaching middle school math, a few of these classroom projects have become staples in my classroom. In this post, I plan to share a few of these ideas. (1) Assignment Notebook Board The first thing my middle school students do (or should be doing!) when they come to class is fill out their assignment notebooks. With some ruler tape that I found at Office Max, I created this assignment notebook board. The number 1 on each day is for what we do in class. The number 2 on each day is any homework that is assigned. For example the 1 might be "Multiply Fractions" and the 2 might be "Pg 232 hw (due tmw)." (2) Math is Everywhere Board I have written about this project in a few other posts, but it is one of my all time favorites to start the year! I have two bulletin boards in my classroom. This one gets filled with these tiles. Students must show how they see math in the real world on their tile. On the back of their tile, they must write a paragraph explaining how math is seen in the topic that they chose! You can click HERE for a free set of the bulletin board letters! (3) Challenge of the Week Many of you have already seen or tried out the Challenge of the Week in your classroom! I have loved seeing the pictures! Each week, I put up a new challenge problem. They are optional and students have until the end of the day on Thursday to turn it in. Anyone who gets it correct gets a small prize on Friday when we go over the answer! Both the 6th Grade Challenge of the Week Problems and the 8th Grade Challenge of the Week Problems are FREE in my TpT store. Enjoy! (4) Teacher Book Shelf My teacher book shelf took on some major changes recently. I started with this new way of organizing all of my math workshop materials. I decided to organize them more by the type of game, rather than by the topic like I had done in the past. I cleared these shelves off and organized them in these containers that I had ordered a few years ago. If you are looking for the materials and resources that I use for math workshop, be sure to check out my Math Mega Bundle (Upper Elementary/Middle School) and my Math Mega Bundle (8th Grade Math). Below these containers, I have two shelves with labels for Monday through Friday. This is where I put all of my plans and resources that I will be using for the coming week. This has been a useful way to stay organized and prepared throughout the week! As you can see, I am not quite ready for the first week of school... On the bottom of these shelves are my task cards, which very well could be the hardest resource when it comes to organization! I found these containers at Michaels. They have worked out pretty well. I have two sets of task cards that I use throughout each school year for each grade level. I have a regular set of task cards and then a set of enrichment task cards. Each set takes up two of these containers. Teaching two different grades means I end up with 8 of these containers, which is pretty manageable! Check out the links below if you are interested in the task cards for each grade level! 6th Grade Math Task Cards Bundle 6th Grade Math Enrichment Task Cards Bundle 7th Grade Math Task Cards Bundle 7th Grade Math Enrichment Task Cards Bundle 8th Grade Math Task Cards Bundle 8th Grade Math Enrichment Task Cards Bundle (5) Bulletin Board (Number 2) My second bulletin board is filled with some routine-oriented and expectation posters. I made these the last few years. The colored math workshop poster shows where students of each group should be at any given time. The homework data chart is where we record our homework data. As a class, we figure out what percentage of homework we turn in on time each day. Over the course of the year, we graph these and look at trends. It also becomes a fun competition between classes! (6) Bobblehead Collection I started my bobblehead collection a while ago and it has just grown ever since! Students enjoy seeing them and it is a fun way for students to get to know me and my interest in baseball! My wife and I are trying to get to all 30 MLB stadiums, and recently made it to Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City. Luckily it was a bobblehead giveaway, so the Kevin Appier Royals bobblehead is the most recent addition to the collection!
Subitizing is the foundation for number sense and mental math. Learn about common mistakes teachers make when teaching subitizing.
Extra math practice with FREE 6th Grade Math Worksheets for 6th grade math at home. You will love that these 6th grade worksheets include the answer key!
I started putting together these math joke of the week posters at the end of last school year. I'm super excited about how it turned out. I put the finishing
Stinky Feet will forever be my favorite way to review for math! When I saw this from Kelsee { @mrshudsonteaches on Instagram } I knew I’d love it (and my students would too!). As a forme…
