Combination snowflakes!!

My sweet kiddos this year are always surprising me with things that they do. One morning this week one of my boys brought me a white board with an idea that he had for a math activity that we could do. This is what he showed me:

He said "We can all pick a number and write all the different combinations on the points of the snowflakes! And then we can hang them up around the room!!" I thought it was a great idea and we made them that afternoon!

When you are making snowflakes and you fold the paper enough to make it look like a pizza pie it's not hard to know where to hold and where to cut, but I wanted these ones to have a specific shape and number of points so I had them fold the paper into quarters.   I gave everyone a sticker on one corner of their folded paper and put a sticker on the same corner of the tracer. This way everyone knew exactly where to place the tracer on the paper so we all got actual snowflakes and not random cut apart pieces of paper.

After everyone cut out their snowflakes I had them pick a teen number to use. We are getting really good with our facts to 10 and are working on facts to 20.  Some students needed some extra support with the use of some counters and a number bond in order to make the 4 different combinations.

When they had come up with their 4 combinations on a white board I let them place them on their snowflakes.  They matched the marker colors and placed the numbers for each combination on opposite points of the snowflakes.

By some horrible mistake I found myself VERY low on white construction paper (in the middle of January!) so we had a lot of blue snowflakes ha!  After they had written all of their number combinations, we folded the snowflakes back up (with the number side out) and cut holes in the middle to add some more interest.




This was such a fun and easy way to practice some math facts and I just loved the fact that it was a student's idea!!




You can grab the template for the tracer here.

We are diving head first into some penguin research this week. I hope yall have a great week!!