Friday, January 2, 2015

Addition Pizzas Craftivity Make Math Fun!

Hello Again Café Friends!!! {I think I've already started Winter hibernation.}
 
Welcome to 2015!
Christmas is over, the decorations are down, and I'm trying to trash as many leftover sweets as possible. {TRYING is the key word here} Ugh! Sugar is my weakness.
 
To help keep my mind off the white chocolate & peppermint covered pretzels and key lime fudge I wanted to share a fun and simple activity I created recently to help students better understand the concept of adding two numbers. We made Addition Pizzas!
 
 
Before starting this activity I cut out some rough triangles to form the pizza crust. Small strips of white paper were the cheese and red circles were pepperoni.
 
I had each student choose no more than 10 pieces each of the cheese and pepperoni. They "made" their pizzas by gluing their toppings on the crust however they wanted.
 
Once their pizza slice was "made" they were given a blank notecard. {A great Dollar Tree find--I use blank notecards all the time for students to jot down quick responses and sentences.}
 
On the board I wrote: I have ___ pepperoni and ___ cheese. Students copied this and filled in the blanks using information from their pizza slice. From that information, they were asked to use the blank notecard to write an addition equation for their pizza.
 
 
 
Students enjoyed this simple, fun craftivity to reinforce addition concepts we've been learning. They'd compare how many pieces of cheese and pepperoni with other pizza slices at their table, which led to a lot of purposeful math talk.  :-)
 
Throughout our lessons on addition, students completed math vocabulary journal pages related to addition concepts we were learning. These are on 1/2 pages, so it helps cut down on paper. I would copy and assemble the pages into a mini journal booklet. I chose math vocabulary words from this math pack that aligned with our learning.
 
 
 
 
 
This was also a great way for me to differentiate for students. To enrich, I would give students some additional word pages and allow them to use the dictionary to search for the meaning and compare that to their description.
To remediate, I would allow students to tell me what they knew about the vocabulary word as I modeled the vocabulary word with manipulatives.
These would be perfect to use in guided math groups as you meet with students to talk about these math concepts. It was also a great way for me to informally assess.
 
This is from my Math Vocabulary Journals Pack.
 
 
I hope you can use some of these math ideas with your students!
Happy New Year to all and best wishes for a productive year in 2015!!
 


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2 comments:

Unknown said...

What a cute craftivity! Love it! I'm sure your kiddos had so much fun, they didn't realize how much they were learning while making this cute craft.

Unknown said...

This activity was a lot of fun. It was pretty easy to prepare, too. Cut pieces one day and have them ready to use. You can differentiate by using more than 2 toppings.