Happy Easter!

The time before Easter is a great time to incorporate hands-on Math. I love to use jelly beans to review sorting, graphing, and to introduce probability. My students work in small groups and are given a fresh, new bag of jelly beans (I get mine from Dollar General - they're the perfect size for a group of three). They sort them on laminated sorting sheets, like this:

Sorry for the blurry pic!

After the kids get to nibble on some jelly beans, we reuse the beans to practice creating bar graphs with a scale of 2. We later used our bar graphs to describe what fractional parts each color represented, and that was a great segue into probability and talking about which color they would most likely pick if they were to reach in their bag and pick only one out. I also put several handfulls of jelly beans into a paper bag and let students reach in a take a set number and then we make pie charts of the colors they picked. We did all of this in one afternoon, but in future, I'd like to spread it out over the course of a week. My students really enjoyed the activities!

In case you'd like any of the files, just click the thumbnails below.