Milk Caps Math

My three year old loves to play with the growing collection of milk caps and lids. I am planning some sort of mural using the recycled lids, but until then we are getting lots of fun math skills in! So far we have used the milk caps for:

Ladybug Math activity

Milk caps make great math counters for little fingers.

Milk caps make great eyes in art projects.

I have made up a couple of Busy Bags for my kids that have a collection of milk caps with stickers on them to decorate. It's a simple but fun activity when you are waiting in a restaurant!

My older son is becoming a chess fanatic and it's frustrating to my daughter because he's busy and she can't touch the chess pieces. So I brought out a checkers board...and it didn't interest her at all. Then I sat our collection of lids next to the board and VOILA, instant activity. She slowly put the caps onto the board until every space was covered. At times she seemed to be matching the lids by color and size too. What a fun way to practice one-to-one correspondence. 

Later we sorted the collection by color and began to build a simple graph. Big brother stopped by to explain that they had to be lined up just so you could compare the number. She listened attentively and even helped him rearrange the graph. Ahhhhhhhh....I love having his voice in teaching our little girl.

Bean Sticks!

A bean stick is simply a popsicle stick with 10 beans glued to it! Easy right? I love frugal teaching tools!

I decided to use tongue depressors with lima beans that I had spray painted green. To attach the beans I used white Elmer's glue. Hot glue would likely make a stronger hold but I wanted to do this project WITH my son, not FOR him. So I opted for the white glue so he could make these independently.

We will be using the bean sticks for counting, place value, adding & subtracting. I will post activities as we do them!

Extra beans that are spray painted on just one side will also be used as counters. We've been using these this past year to play a fun game called "bean toss addition". I will try to track down the link from Heidi Songs that has printables to go with the game!

One great resource to go with your bean sticks is the "Count Your Beans" mat that Fran over at Kindergarten Crayons has posted. (In the last week I have spent countless hours reading her blog. I even had dreams one night I was in her classroom!)

http://kindergartencrayons.blogspot.com/search?q=bean&submit=search

This other blog post by Fran explains how to use the mat: http://kindergartencrayons.blogspot.com/2011/05/count-your-beans.html