The Measure of a Heart uses candy hearts to practice measuring perimeter and area.  After finishing the worksheet, use your candy hearts to measure the perimeter and area of other things around the house.

(In case you need to know…Perimeter is the measurement around an object and area is the measurement of an object’s surface.  To measure the perimeter of the hearts on the worksheet, place candy hearts around the edges of the hearts – the dark lines – and count how many it takes to go all the way around.  To measure the area, see how many candy hearts will fit inside the hearts on the worksheet.)

The Candy Pattern worksheet (which didn’t transfer to a jpg well and is MUCH nicer in the PDF download) allows your child to make various patterns using candy hearts.

(In case you need to know…each of the letters on the worksheet (A, B, C) represent a different colored candy heart.  So, for instance, an ABA pattern, where A represents pink and B represents green would look like: pink, green, pink, pink, green, pink, pink, green, pink.  Your child gets to decide which colors represent each letter of the pattern.)

You can find several other fun math related V-Day ideas at Googol Learning.

I’ve been pinning fun ideas on my Valentine’s Pinterest board, too!

For those of you interested in learning how to add more living math into your homeschool, consider Loving Living Math.

Math

My preschooler made a concrete graph with his candy.

He had to sort the candy into groups before we could graph them and he created the group names all by himself – gum, chocolate, suckers, crunchy, chewy and hard.

After completing all sorts of averages based on different groupings of the candy, Caleb (6th grade) created this graph using Excel.  (This is another great computer integration activity for those of you who’ve asked me to share more about how we use the computer in our homeschool!)

Science

Not a great picture, but I wanted you to see the entire concrete classification system my 6th grader made with his candy.  {A classification system is otherwise known as a taxonomy, which we compared to the classification system for plants and animals.}

Beginning with the main group of ‘candy’, Caleb decided how to break the large group into two smaller groups. He came up with ‘chocolate’ and ‘non-chocolate’ as his descriptions.

For each new category, he continued breaking the groups down into two new categories until he ended up with each specific type of candy in it’s own pile.

Finally, we walked through each candy’s “classification”. An example from our taxonomy chart -Candy; chocolate; bright wrappers; made with peanuts; made with peanut butter, crunchy, Butterfinger. Besides being a science activity, this also fits into the category of logic!

Check out some other candy math lessons we’ve posted in the past, too!

• M&M Math
• Candy Heart Math

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