Hearts are a wonderful shape to explore in math and we spent a little time estimating, counting, sorting, and graphing a few of our hearts…
We started our heart math by estimating a set of felt hearts. Â I asked the children to think in their minds how many hearts were on my board. Of course, most of the children said their answer out loud and the answers ranged from six to twenty-something…
After the children shared their guesses, we rearranged the hearts on our board and counted how many hearts there actually were on our board…
It just so happened that we had 12 hearts on our board which is exactly how many students we have in our class. So each child chose a heart to help us graph the hearts by color on our graphing board…
We discovered that we had three colors of hearts and three columns on our graph…
After our hearts were all sorted and on placed in the columns of our graph, we reviewed our graph. The children noticed that the column with the pink hearts had the most hearts in it and the column with the dark purple hearts had the least and the remaining column fit in between the two…
As a follow up to our felt board heart math, we created our own sticker heart graphs. Each child started by using a pencil and a ruler to draw their own lines and columns on their paper…
We gave each child their own little cup of sticker hearts and invited the children to sort their hearts on their paper graph, just like we had sorted our felt hearts earlier in the day…
Once the children completed sorting their hearts into different columns (or sections) of their graphs, then the children took the paper off the back of the stickers to stick them in place on their graphs…
This graphing process was a wonderful exercise in math as well as fine motor development (taking the paper off the stickers) and in prewriting skills (drawing the graphs)…
After the children completed their graphs, then they were invited to print their name on the graph and to add a title to their graph by printing the word “heart” at the top of their graph…
Some of the children chose to print the word “heart” and others decided to add an entirely different title on their graph (the choice was theirs to make)…
And as the children completed their graphs, many of them took the time to review the results of their graph with Mrs. Courtney or I by telling us which of their columns had the most to least amount of hearts…
What an amazing job my students did on their graphs and understanding of the process…
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