31 Days of Halloween - Day 20!

How to Look Perfectly Brilliant at School...
Using the Stuff You Have at Home!

Here is a perfectly awesome way (if I do say so myself) to come up with some fab manipulatives for math without spending any money, while clearing out some teaching clutter from your overflowing boxes of teaching "stuff". If you are teaching an upper elementary grade, say 4-6, don't click off this page because your kids are beyond manipulatives! Well, we wish they were, but I would be surprised if a couple of them were not seriously lagging in the old testing department. Perhaps they never got to use manipulatives extensively enough in the younger grades. No matter. They can have them now.

These are not little plastic hippos.

Here's what I did.

I found a box of junky odds and ends that included some holiday stickers. They probably cost about $1.99 whenever I did buy them. I also came across some cool scrapbooking
paper that I unloaded off off somebody for $3 for a gigantic 
stack this past summer. Stay with me. Okay. So I choose a
piece of orange patterned paper, and simply peel and stick the stickers right onto the paper! Because they are stickers,
right? No glue needed! Nothing!

Then I trimmed the sheet of paper down so that it would be the right size to fit into a sleeve of laminating plastic, turned on my trusty 10-year old laminator, and ran that baby through! Out it popped. I trimmed the pieces, and voila...40+
pieces of halloweenie math counters! Nice and flat so they will take up approximately zero space in my October
supplies box in a nice, flat envelope!

To use them, put them out on your math center table in something quaint like this black plastic frozen food dish. 

Now for the visuals!

This is how they turned out...they are about the size of a quarter, but a few were bigger.

This is how cute they look in their little dish. Way to recycle, Mrs. Pierce! There was an added bonus to this humble little pad of stickers. I discovered, on the back, two cool little scene backgrounds meant to be used, I suppose with the
stickers. And they were even reversible! 

Sorry about the glare!

Now here comes the part you have been waiting for....how might some older kids use these to help with their math?
How about to do some fractional parts? Or maybe make
a multiplication array? Who knows?

Of course, the younger kids will have no problem figuring 
out how to help themselves with story problems. It's even,
kinda, you know, fun!

Does anybody out there think this might work for them?
I'd love to know! 

Happy Reading!
Till next time, Nancy