As I was planning my Valentine’s Day party last week, I had a weird, random series of events that led to a math activity. One game suggested that you give students a few marshmallows and have them toss them into a partner’s mouth. I thought, “Hey! My kids will love this, and proceeded to buy several bags of marshmallows.”
As I told my husband about the game, he said, “Ewwww, gross! Who is going to be ____’s partner?!” He was right. Who was going to be the nose picker’s partner?! I quickly revised my plan, and this domino effect of math fun just kind of created itself!
I quickly threw together this recording sheet, and put ten marshmallows into sandwich baggies for my kids!
When we were ready for math on Friday, I asked each student to stand up, try to be at least a little bit coordinated, and toss one marshmallow into their mouth. Then, they recorded if their marshmallow “made” and “missed” their mouth. We repeated this process nine more times.
On a side note, I recorded this and shared it with the parents of my students. It was entertaining!
Next comes the part where one of my kids said, “Mrs. Wilp, can’t you ever let us just have FUN without ruining it with MATH?!” (Bahaha! You’re funny kid. The answer is no.) They recorded their number of “made” marshmallows in the number one spot and collected data from three other students. Together, they worked to find the mean, median, mode, and range of their data. We have already covered this, but WHOA, my kids totally needed a little review. You know the types of questions I heard, “Is the mean the average or the one in the middle?” UGH!
Then, we reviewed ratios by writing ratios to represent our data.
And last but not least, we reviewed writing the data as percentages and fractions.
You can grab this recording sheet, along with an alternative form in case you would rather use a season candy such as candy corn, candy hearts, or jelly beans, by clicking the image above!