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Mathematics Activities

Base Ten Blocks

  • Make your own base ten blocks
    • This can be done with beans and popsicle sticks.

Popsicle sticks with 10 beans glued on each

  • Then create a HTO chart (hundreds, tens, ones) chart on a piece of paper

Graph depicting a hundreds, tens, and ones chart

Then do these series of activities with a partner:

  1. Make 127
  2. Add 24 +31
  3. Add 36+48   (How did you model regrouping?)
  4. Subtract 45-22
  5. Subtract 32-18 (How did you model borrowing?)
  6. Subtract 40-15

Reflect:

  1. Why is it important to make math visible?
  2. Is it enough for teachers to model this?
  3. The next step after concrete activities is pictorial.  How can you make this activity pictorial?

Fractions

Make paper fraction strips

Strips of colored paper representing various stages of fractions

Then model the following activities using your fraction strips:

  1. Compare >  <  =

½ and ¼   ⅓ and ⅙    ⅔ and 4/6  1 and 4/4

  1. Add ½ and ½
  2. Add ⅓ and 2/6
  3. Subtract ½ and ¼
  4. Add ⅓ and ¼
  5. Reduce 2/12

Dream House Activity

This activity is designed to practice area and perimeter.

Student example of the dream house activity on color paper

  1. Use the Grid Paper to create rooms and label them.
    • They all must have right angles and be a rectangle (remember a square is just a special rectangle).
  2. Find the area of each room.
  3. Add them together.
  4. Find the perimeter of your whole house.

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School Age Curriculum Copyright © 2026 by Tanessa Sanchez and Kerry Diaz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.