Hands-on Activities are great because they really get the students involved. They motivate and encourage the students to want to learn. I believe that hands-on activities are more stimulating for the students' brains than just having having them sit in their desks all day and do written work. Since children get bored and uninterested when they are just taking notes all day, I will make sure to use many hands-on activities that excite them and give them a reason to want to come to class.
One of My Activities
FUN with M&M's
Objectives: The students will be able to review the measures of central tendency by determining mean, median and mode. They will review their understanding of estimation, sorting, graphing, fractions and percentage as well as probability (with and without replacement).
Materials
~individual smalle bags of M&M's
~copies of worksheets for each student
~pencils
~colored pencils or markers
~individual smalle bags of M&M's
~copies of worksheets for each student
~pencils
~colored pencils or markers
~copies of worksheets for each student
~pencils
~colored pencils or markers
Probability
My hands on activity involves working with M&M's to solve problems. I have five different worksheets with the following topics: predicting, estimating and finding an actual amount, making a bar graph, fractions, percents, mean, median and mode and probability (with and without replacement). I will cover each one of these topics more indept for my students in my own classroom. In the first picture under probability, the student is demonstrating picking an M&M from the bag and then replacing it. Then, in the second picture, she picked an M&M, but did not replace it before she picked another M&M out of the bag. This lesson could be for any age level, but is more geared for middle schoolers. Since kids love food especially candy, I think this will be a great activity in motivating them to learn these math concepts. In addition, they get to color for the bar graph worksheet. No matter what age you are, everyone gets enjoyment out of coloring!
Work Then Eat!
The student is counting out all the different colored M&M colors, so she can make her bar graph.