I Heart Math

Valentine’s candy conversation hearts are a favorite around our house.  I recently saw this post about these cool conversation hearts that have letters instead of sayings on them.

Of course, being math minded as I am, my first thought was, “What math could teachers do with these conversation hearts?”  Here are my initial 🙂 ideas…do you have any more for me?

Give each student a snack-sized zippered plastic bag with some of the hearts in order for them to do each of these activities, that way after playing around with these they can eat their own hearts:

Which has more?

Instead of sorting by color, have the students sort the hearts in their bag into Consonants and Vowels.  Before you have them sort, have them guess which group will have more and discuss why.  Then after they have sorted the hearts, have them write the amounts in each group and compare the quantities.

All the Letters?

To find out if your bags contain all the letters, have each child create their own concrete graph.  Have them organize the letters in alphabetical order, but if there is more than one of a letter they stack those hearts above.  When it is complete, they could graph their results on graph paper or work together to combine the individual data to see how many of each of the letters the entire class has.  Do you have one for every letter of the alphabet?  Which letters do you have the most of?

Heart a-Stack

This one is the game my daughter’s Kindergarten class will be playing during their Valentine’s Party this week (I gotta get these hearts out of my house before we eat them all).  The kids will have 60 seconds to stack the Alphabet Conversation Hearts as tall as they can without their tower falling over.  If it falls over, they have to start again.  At the end of the minute, each child counts how many they still have standing in their stack.  This gives those kinder kiddos another chance to practice those counting skills.

So, got any more ideas for me?

FYI, I found the Alphabet Conversation Hearts at Target but they are only available in stores…nearest one to me is 3 hours away, but was able to stock up on a bunch for my kids’ teachers while traveling for work.

Update: I thought some more about this today and got a bit more detailed and added a new activity to give to my 1st grader’s teacher.  You can download these instructions here.

Activity 1 would be All the Letters? because this gives the kids a chance to sort out the letters and see what they got.

Then move into Which Has More, as the grouping of the letters into consonants and vowels will be helpful with the next activity.

Letter Rip happened spontaneously as my children were helping me prepare the bags of conversation hearts.  My kindergartener actually started it by placing ‘f’ ‘u’ ‘l’ out and saying “Mom, I spelled full.”  Soon ‘ful’ turned into ‘flu,’ then that turned into ‘fly’ and on and on it went with my Kindergartener and 1st grader.

Then as the last activity (and one you can use to bribe them to ensure they don’t eat all their candies too soon because they need to have as many as they can for this activity) do Heart a-Stack.