Math Discovery Makes a Comeback!

After some successful science discovery time last week, I was encouraged and motivated to reintroduce math discovery in my classroom.  Discovery learning was an effective approach for me last year and I developed/sourced a number of discovery tub ideas (which I've pinned here).  Many of last year's discovery tubs focused on math learning and I knew that discovery time was valuable for developing students' numeracy skills. So, when students asked me about "putting numbers on the learning carpet", I decided it was time to get back to math discovery in our classroom. 

 I've included our most recent math discovery tubs and a list of contents for each below:

Discovery Tub Contents:

Various dice - I included 6 sided, 9 sided and 20 sided dice to meet the needs of a variety of learners.

Dominoes

White Board Markers

Laminated Roll the Dice and Domino Addition cards - These are basically "fill in the blank" addition and subtraction number sentence templates.  I already had them made and laminated from math games, so I used them but you could easily substitute any sort of blank number sentence templates.

 

    

Discovery Tub Contents:

Number cards for 0-100

Squares and triangles in different colours

Learning Carpet or other 100 grid

It was awesome to watch the students at this discovery tub work as a team to correctly "fill in" the hundred chart and develop colour patterns for odd and even.  They also had to decide on whether to create a zero-based 100 chart or to start at 1!  Some students asked each other to name the hidden number under a coloured card.

 

Discovery Tub Contents:

Playing card mats (printed from First Grade School Box blog)
Decks of cards (I included some with numerals only/no "dots" to count)

This was a returning tub from last year and it was neat to see students tackle more challenging number sentences and fact families!