Red Plug Hunting Years K - 4

Summary This activity comes from the great tradition of Easter Egg Hunting. Various small press-seal sandwich bags of red plugs are hidden around the classroom. The first job is to find them. The second job is to count the number you find and check it another way. The third job is to share the total of the found plugs among all the children who have been hunting. Easy to state, easy to start, good fun, lots of maths and adaptable to small and large groups, or the whole class. Suitable for threading. Materials Red boards - the number depends on how the activity is organised Press-seal sandwich bags Acknowledgement This activity was stimulated by a conversation with a great grandmother who was describing the fun her great grandchildren had at the family Easter Egg Hunt. Thanks to Kym Linke, Department for Education & Child Development, South Australia, and Cathy Linke and her class for playing around with the idea and helping it grow.

Procedure Red Plug Hunting can be used with a group or the whole class. The teacher arranges for sandwich bags of some (any number) of red plugs to be made up by herself, or a helping parent, or the children. When the children aren't around, some or all of the bags are hidden in the room. At some point the children are told that the bags have been hidden and they have to find them. When a child finds one bag they return to their seat with it. Then they can help someone else search if they want to. When all the bags are found, partners open their bags and count and record their number (perhaps on a sheet prepared by the teacher), their partner's number, the difference between the two numbers, the total of the two bag numbers, how the plugs in their bag can be arranged in equal rows, or whatever else the teacher or children want to find out about their number. The next phase is when two pairs make a team of four and all four bags of plugs are shared equally with appropriate recording. Discussion too of course about what to do with left over plugs. The final step is when the teacher puts out the partially filled red boards from which the plugs were originally removed and asks for all the plugs to go back in a space. A 'great big pack up'.

Content addition facts beyond 10 addition facts to 10 counting division exploring large numbers fraction calculations group (or skip) counting making/recording groups of 10 mathematical conversation multiplication - array model multiplication operations - whole number recording - written subtraction times tables

             

Kym comments:

I did the activity as a class demonstration the first time with two students doing the activity, worked really well. I got the students to fill in a sheet as they did the activity. I have attached it for you to share.

• Sample Recording Sheet: Red Plug Hunting

             

             

From The Classroom

Photos and comments are taken (with permission) from a presentation these teachers made during a six day professional development program organised by the Canberra Goulburn Catholic Education Office.

First you have to find the poly plugs. Once you've done that, you count how many you have.

We put the plugs in tens and spares left over got put into the ones. Then we worked out our total.

I counted in twos. I can count mine in fives.

I counted in tens. When there was one missing I knew there were nine.

We added two groups together. We brought the tens over first. The numbers were getting bigger. They were increasing.     In the end we added all the poly plugs together. The whole class had 650.

The numbers grew into the hundreds. One group had 114. Another group had 192.

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