Over the past four years, I have blogged off and on about our math bags so I thought I would bring a little update to our use of the math bags this year. To begin with, each of our students have their own math bag that they take home each week and fill with five or so small items (called math tokens) that they have found around the house…
As a group, the children share what is in their math bags. They talk about what the items are, what they might have been used for, and perhaps what color or shape they are. The discussion is left open ended and can lead in many different directions depending on what the children brought and the interest of the children. The goal of bringing things from home is for the children to relate to the items as something they would see in their real world at home or at the park and so that they would see opportunity for math all around them in their daily, natural, and everyday world…
The children bring all kinds of things in their math bags including straws, caps, Q-tips, rocks, acorns, leaves, cotton balls, coke tabs, paper clips, erasers, and the list goes on. We work with whatever shows up unless it is edible and then we most likely share it, count it, then eat it or toss it…
I like to keep the math bag sharing and counting process consistent but at the same time, casual, warm, and inviting. In order to keep it interesting, we have to lead the children through the process in a way that is fun and engaging…
The math bag tokens are saved all throughout the school year for different math related activities. We eventually sort them into different jars as we get a large enough collection for estimating, patterning, graphing and other processes…
We explore the math tokens in a different way each week after our sharing time. The exploring process is always hands on and the children love sifting through the math tokens and remembering which ones they brought or taking a closer look at what their friends brought…
Our preschoolers  (3 and 4 year olds) explore the math tokens a little differently than our prekindergarten age (4 and 5 year old) students do which is what I also like about math bags…
It is easy to use the same tokens and yet modify the different processes we use them for to meet the interest and readiness of each child…
After we finish exploring the math tokens, the children put them back in either our large class math bag or in the math jars to use again the next week…
I have shared past posts to other ways we have used our math bag tokens and to see them, all you need to do is scroll back up to the top of the page (here on the blog) and type in the word “math bag” in google search bar located in the upper right hands side of my blog. It will pop open a window of different posts related to math bags. But I will share a few links below to get you started…
Links to Grow On
Exploring the Estimation Station
Available on Amazon