We spent much of the afternoon preparing for a special dinner of -

Heart Pizza

Lemon-Strawberry Slushies

and Heart-shaped Ice Cream Cookies

We finished off the night by watching the Charlie Brown Valentine special from earlier in the week.  I’m not a huge Charlie Brown fan, but the kids loved it!

At church Sunday, the Jr. Church lessons focused on, of course, LOVE.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.  The second is this:  Love your neighbor as yourself.  There is no commandment greater than these.  Mark 12:30-31

We played some fun games after the lesson, too.

Pinky Linky

Candy Heart Relay

Blindfolded Coloring

Candy Heart Memory Circle

And, we kept on celebrating Monday at co-op with the annual Valentine’s parties.

There was so much love shared that I think we’re all caught up for awhile!  LOL  Hope your V-Day was special!

Whether you have extra M&M’s, Skittles, Smarties, Runts, or just a big bunch of assorted candy bars, take a few minutes to turn those sweets into more than cavities.  Even little bitty ones can sort candy, place the pieces on a blank grid, then color a bar graph.  As the kiddos get bigger, all the more fun they can have graphing their candy.  Here’s a post from last year about how we used M&M’s to do all sorts of graphs.  This year, we did some candy graphing, but not quite as in depth as last year.

And don’t forget all those autumn leaves!  Make a nature walk even more productive by collecting a sack of leaves to sort and graph.

Literal or concrete graphs are not only fun, but help younger ones understand better what a graph on paper represents.

After making the concrete graphs, my children jotted the information and used centimeter grid paper to design their own graphs.

Happy graphing!

Using the information sheets that the website provides, the kids had to fill out a chart to show how many presidents have come from which states.  Then, they used graph paper to create a bar graph to show the information from the chart.  Fun activity!

Talk about a fun week of math learning!  Here are a couple of the activities my children did during our week of m&m math fun.  Overall, we covered estimation, sorting, counting, adding, word problems, pictographs, bar graphs, comparison graphs, pie graphs, graphs made in a spreadsheet program, fractions, fair shares (division), mean/median/mode, decimals and percentages.  I’d say that was enough math to rival any textbook curriculum for a week!

http://www.col-ed.org/cur/math/math26.txt

graphing and probability

http://score.kings.k12.ca.us/lessons/mandm.html

estimating, sorting, counting, graphing, plotting, fractions, percentage, and calculating mean, median, mode

http://faculty.roosevelt.edu/donovan/documents/M%20&%20M%20Math%20Intermediate_files/M%20&%20M%20Math%20Intermediate.htm

predicting, classifying, graphing, percentages

http://ofcn.org/cyber.serv/academy/ace/math/cecmath/cecmath013.html

averages with m&m cookies

http://www.lessonplanspage.com/MathEstimationClassification.htm

easy estimation and classification

http://www.atozteacherstuff.com/pdf.htm?m&mschart.pdf

printable m&m graph

http://www.create.cett.msstate.edu/create/classroom/lplan_view.asp?articleID=98

collect, graph, record and interpret data to create a bar graph on the computer

http://www.learnnc.org/lessons/KarenWalker5232002614

estimate, sort, graph and add with printable charts near the bottom

http://www.beaconlearningcenter.com/Lessons/2622.htm

fractions, decimals and percentage

http://www.mms.com/us/fungames/

official m&m website

http://www.ciese.org/math/activities/candycircles/index.html

mean, median and mode

http://42explore.com/choclat.htm

many, many chocolate related activities and links

Here’s how the lesson went……We decided on a topic - animals.  He decided to gather data from 40 people by asking what their favorite animal is.  He then came up with a list of several animals he would let them choose from.  Then, he wrote the animal’s names on a piece of paper and tallied the “votes” as they were given to him.

Next, he wrote each animal’s name on a notecard and placed the cards along the floor.  He knew he needed numbers going up the side  to show how many people liked each animal.  He used 1″ tiles to show the results from the 40 people he interviewed.  And finally, he wrote a title card calling his graph, “Favorite Animals”. 

Next time, he’ll be ready to create a graph on paper.  He knows the “parts” because he had to make them and manipulate them.  It’s a strong visual that won’t soon be forgotten.

Mahayla just wanted to be part of the action!  I asked her to create a line graph showing a week’s worth of data from her peak meter numbers.  The doctor will be so impressed with this picture when we include it in her file during the next visit!  He asked her to keep a chart.  Little did he know that we would take him this seriously.  LOL