Valentine Math

Themed-based math activities are always popular in 1st grade, and the two shown below were no exception! Students enjoyed a spin on the usual Name Collection boxes in our 1st grade Everyday Math program--"Be Mine Boxes." Students drew a number of foam hearts, wrote that number in the middle heart, and then wrote four ways to represent that number (we call them other "names" for the number). I am impressed with everyone's hard work and thinking!

Our second Valentine math activity was a lesson in probability. More on that in the captions below...

Conversation Heart Probability...

First, students made a prediction: Which color candy heart did they think they would pull out of the bag the most often? (They did not look in the bag first.)

Students then took candy hearts out of the bag one at a time and recorded the color with a tally mark on their recording sheets.

After a few minutes of drawing hearts out of the bag and tallying their colors, I stopped the class and had them record which color was pulled out of the bag most often. Each table had a color that was the most common. So, I posed the question, "Why do you think each table had a color that was pulled out of the bag more often than any other?" Students still hadn't looked in the bags. This was a stumper! Many figured it was just luck/coincidence.

I then prompted students to work with their table mates to take the hearts out of the bag and sort them. What did they notice then? THEN the lightbulbs of discovery started to glow--"Oh, now it's obvious why one color was more popular!" and "NOW I get it!" and "It all makes sense now!" 

Each table group discovered that there was a lot more hearts of one certain color in each bag. Therefore, if there were many more orange hearts in the bag, it was most likely that students would pull an orange heart out more often than any other color.

It was so neat to see/hear students make the mathematical discovery of probability. I was so proud of how they listened to one another and worked as a team. 

Some table groups did not have as clear a "winner" as far as which color was represented more than any other, but all groups did get to see how the probability of pulling certain colors out of the bag was much less than others (for example, in the photo above, there was a low probability of pulling an orange candy heart from the bag). It was great! (Can you tell I'm excited about this lesson?!)

This isn't math (see below), but children decorated bags at the end of the day Monday in preparation for our party yesterday. They also made cards today. I hope it all made it home safely!