I would love to take credit for this cute idea but I just can't! Our county had the best math training for K-2. I honestly didn't even want to take a bathroom break because it was so engaging! Here's one of the many ideas the trainer shared.
This activity covers so many standards in math and it just happens to be festive for Halloween (and look great on our walls for parent visitation!) Each student blindly picks 8 legs. There are two colors available in the bag. When they pick their legs, they hole punch 4 holes on each side. After everyone has assembled their spider, we graph according to the 2 colors of legs.
You can see that I put the math sentences up and write them by color to help them find where their spiders belong.
I was amazed by what my kids saw as we looked at our graph. I used little scaffolding at first to see what type of conversation they would generate. They discovered that the doubles had the most spiders because you had a better chance of pulling a little of both colors out. We also discovered that both 0+8 and 8+0 didn't have any spiders because it would be harder to draw out eight of the same color of pipe cleaners. We also discovered doubles and near doubles, the greatest and the least and so much more!
I think we may leave them up for a while and I may create a paper so my quick finishers can read the chart to find data. Oh, disregard the finger in the picture below!
