Happy Fall, everyone! It's Gina from Miss Peluso's Kindergarten, here to share some Fall fun! Are you looking for ways to incorporate the Fall season into your lessons? Last year, I wanted to find a fun and engaging way to teach my students how to compose and decompose numbers. They just weren't "getting" that numbers are made up of smaller numbers, no matter how many activities we tried! After our trip to the apple orchard, I decided that a real world connection might be just what they needed! What's a better way to incorporate both real world connections and Fall than apple pie?!
I decided that the lessons would focus on "recipes" to make apple pie. The recipe would call for a number of apples, and we would figure out how many red and yellow apples we could use to get to the total number of apples that we needed.
We counted out the number of apples that we needed, and placed them in a bucket. Each apple card is double sided (red on one side, yellow on the other). One student got to shake up the bucket and dump the apple cards onto the table.
Then, we sorted the apple cards by color so we could see how many red apples and how many yellow apples we could use in our recipe so that we met the total number of apples that our recipe called for.
We recorded our findings, and talked about how the larger number (the total number of apples) was made up of the two smaller numbers (the red apples and the yellow apples). Then, we put the apples back into the bin, and played again to see if we could make a different combination!
My students really understood the concept of composing and decomposing with this connection to a real life recipe! Of course, we had to end our week with some REAL apple pie!
Want to make some real world connections with your students?! This activity covers numbers 1-10, and is on sale for $1 through Friday!
