Student Motivation: Using the Seasons

It's Saturday already?  It's been a crazy busy week.  Nothing like starting 2nd trimester off with a bang. 

This week has been a ton of fun - but the fun was also academic.  That's my student motivation today as I link up with Joanne over at Head Over Heels for Teaching.  

For example, yesterday my students completed Candy Corn Math to change it up a bit.  

We used Fifth in the Middle's math activity.  I highly recommend it!  It got them working in groups - having that "Math Talk" while they estimated, measured, compared, graphed, surveyed, and created patterns.  It was so much fun!  It took my 4th graders about an hour to tackle the entire thing.  

The prep was pretty easy - I just picked up a big bag of candy corn - and put 1/3 of a cup into a snack size plastic bag.  It easily made 8 bags.  Then the class formed groups of 4, and went to it.  I realized that my kiddos completely had forgot about how to set up a graph, so we had to do that part together... channelling the primary teacher in me.

I love to incorporate the seasons into my classroom.  I hope you have a great day!