Christmas M&M Math fun

Yesterday, my kiddos did an awesome math lesson using M&Ms.  Anytime you can do math and chocolate together is wonderful in my book.  They were super excited when they saw me measuring out candy in Ziploc bags.

One of my co-workers and friend :) found this activity on TPT and asked if I thought our grade level would like to do it....heck yes!  As previously stated, chocolate and math?  Can't go wrong.... except maybe adding some coffee, but ya know, dealing with 7 and 8 year olds!

Anywho, if you like the looks of this activity, head on over to TPT and download it.  The best part (cue the heavenly choirs of angels singing....) is it's FREE!  Not a dime!  

Christmas M&Ms Graphing and Place Value Activity by Johanna Tackitt

Count out 3 groups of 10 and pick a number between 0-9 for the square.  I had more in the bag but that was our treat!

Then we drew our candy inside the circles and square.

My copy done on the document camera!  Good place value review.

Then we sorted by color to make our tally chart and get ready for our graphs.

We made a pictograph and a bar graph.  Since we had so many M&Ms, we had to make our pictograph M&Ms equal two instead of one!  Someone forgot that our key was by 2!  A VERY hard skill to do when the graph is already made, but to make a student recreate that....sheesh....still practicing that one :)

We finished off by looking at our data and coming up with two facts that we could prove using our data.  The sentence starters really helped!

The kids really liked this activity, especially when I told them they could eat the M&Ms after they were done.  I used the Christmas mini-M&Ms from the baking aisle because they were lots cheaper per bag and the kids could work with "more" M&Ms and practice with a higher 2 digit number rather than just a number in the teens.  They thought the little ones were "cute".  

Try this if you can, I think you'll like it.  And, if you are a SA like me (sugaraholic anonymous) you won't want to keep these bags around too long.  I had to do it Monday so I wouldn't eat the whole two bags I bought on Sunday!