Carle Place’s math month celebrations are coming to an end and students are celebrating – and learning – accordingly.
Throughout April and May, Cherry Lane School in the Carle Place School District celebrated math month with a variety of engaging activities that helped students explore mathematical concepts in creative and interactive ways.
Kindergarten students participated in several hands-on learning stations. In one activity, “Geometric Shapes Hop,” students rolled a die to land on a shape and hopped the number of sides that shape had.
They practiced addition and subtraction using a floor mat version of an open number line and experimented with balance scales to compare the weight of objects, discovering that two smaller items could equal the weight of one larger one.
Students also sorted shapes into Venn diagrams made of hula hoops based on color and properties. Using a footprint mat filled with overlapping shapes, they counted footprints and determined which ones belonged to which shape or overlapped with others.
They created bar graphs using toy bricks sorted by color and used flashcards to solve addition, subtraction and greater-than or less-than problems. Hundreds of boards—numbered grids from 1 to 100—were also used for placing randomly drawn numbers in the correct position.
First-grade students expanded on their math skills with skip-counting exercises by ones, fives and odd numbers using colorful mats and large numbered hands. They created larger shapes using tangrams and explored place value through flashcards that illustrated tens and ones with columns posted around the room.
To practice multi-digit addition and subtraction, students drew playing cards to form larger numbers and perform corresponding calculations. One highlight was “Jenga Subtraction,” in which students worked in pairs to pull blocks from an oversized Jenga tower and solve the subtraction problem written on each block. Like their younger peers, they also used hundreds of boards to complete sequences and solve problems.
Second graders took on more advanced concepts. They used a large clock mat to identify times to the hour, minute and second, matching them with flashcards displaying times in both analog and digital formats. A coin mat activity, modeled after the kindergarten footprint mat, helped students identify and total coins placed in overlapping shapes.
Students used a hundred mat and dice to generate numbers for addition and subtraction and participated in a “mystery number” challenge in which symbols, such as fruit, represented missing digits in math problems.
They also solved “magic squares,” a grid-based puzzle requiring students to determine missing numbers based on row and column totals. Like the other grades, second graders used flashcards to reinforce addition and subtraction skills.
Diane Cecere, Cherry Lane School’s math teacher, said she worked to organize the math month activities, helping to bring math to life for the district’s students.
