Math-Themed Worm Activities

Science and math go hand in hand. As part of our kindergarten earthworm unit, Andrea from No Doubt Learning and Erin at The Usual Mayhem have assembled some great math activity that will be a great addition to any worm unit (or just for fun)! Some of the activities I'm going to share we developed ourselves, and others we've borrowed from the wonderful resources available. 

The first math activity I want to share are some AMAZING math manipulatives that focus on tens and ones. Andrea from No Doubt Learning designed these, and I can't say enough how great they are.  She actually has several different games in this free download. The bucket of worms represents the 10's and the single worms represent the ones.

Clever huh? In the first activity, children count the buckets and worms to and then write the double digit number the image represents. I used the answer sheet as an additional activity, by cutting strips apart and separating the answers so he could match the correct numbers with each row. My son still struggles with writing his numbers, so this was a nice warm up to the activity!   

While my son can recognize numbers, but often forgets how to get started when writing numbers himself. So I  keep a laminated strip of the numbers that I copied from Handwriting Without Tears book. It ensures we are writing our numbers properly each time! (And yummy grapes...brain food?)

Once I saw Andrea's first activity we brainstormed an idea to make tens and ones a game using the same graphics. The cards are designed so that the bucket cards have a different background as the one's. See my photo below. I laminated the Tens and Ones Recording sheet and used Dry Erase Crayons to record our answers. I've seen a number of unfavorable reviews of these crayons, but we love them. The complaint is that its too hard to erase. But this is why I like these crayons. The markers often wipe off way too easy, not allowing you to finish the activity. We keep pieces of felt handy to erase our crayons, and it works well.    

To play the game each contestant draws a card from both the 10's and the 1's pile and writes the number the graphics symbolize. We made it competitive by seeing who would win each round. You can see that we put a check mark by the winner in each row.

The next math activity I want to share is one we found on Mrs. Alderson's blog "Rowdy in room 300." She did all kinds of cool wormy activities in May 2012. The math activity came from a free TPT download called "Wondrous Worms." I used the Fact/Opinion assessment sheet found on pages 12 & 13, and then the "Ordering Those Squirmy Worms" activity on pages 16 and 17. I printed mine off on colored paper, because...why not? The children cut apart the numbers 1-20, and paste them in the correct order on the table.

But I took it to the next level, by having Caleb use poker chips (didn't have anything worm-themed) and cover up certain numbers to introduce him to skip counting. We started with even, then odd, then moved onto by 3's. This was a great way to begin talking about skip counting as he could visually see the missing numbers covered up, and then only say the numbers he did see!

I am spending an entire post on our gummy worm measuring activity, but we also did this simple measuring activity called "Centimeter Worms" designed by Cynthia Vautrot. You can get this activity for free at her TPT store. The child uses playdough (or anything really) and makes various lengths of "worms." It was a simple concept but helped us work on the measuring skills (yeah metric..!) It was also neat to see how my son manipulated the dough to fit the measurement. Instead of taking dough off of the worm, he just squished it to fit. Hence the obese worms you see below!

As you can see, we had a lot of fun with the wormy math activities we did! If you haven't already, be sure to check my earthworm page to see what else we have been doing.

I'd love to hear what ideas you have to integrate math into your themes! What else could we have done?