Math Crafts for the First Grade or Special Education classroom

Anyone else sign up to teach summer school this year? Because both Double Dose teachers work at special education agencies, we both work extended school year (ESY) for six weeks during the summer months. Something that has helped our sanity during ESY is our summer math craftivities, which we’ve been using to review our math skills with our students this year.

The summer math craftivities highlight four important topics within the first grade Common Core curriculum. All you need is a printer, white copy paper, some various colored printer paper, and the digital download of our summer math crafts.

We typically use these math crafts on Fridays to round out the review topic of the week. And let’s face it, by Friday in the summertime, everybody is ready for an easy day. Luckily these math crafts do just that!

Our students tend to become overwhelmed when we ask them to remember and practice strategies we taught them months ago. We typically spend 1-2 math lessons reviewing the content before we ask our students to complete a math craft. Below is how we reviewed for the beach ball hundreds chart craft:

We projected a hundreds chart on the whiteboard and practiced identifying numbers one less, ten less, ten more, one hundred more, two less, etc with different colored dry erase markers. We followed the “I do, we do, you do” strategy of direct instruction during the lesson and our kiddos excelled! Another positive: they were extremely motivated to come up to the whiteboard, use the fun colored markers, and show off their skills.

Summer school, typically, is not anyone’s first choice of summer activity. We know our students would much rather be in the sprinklers, sun, and eating popsicles. To help with summer engagement, we incorporated some food items into our summer math crafts. Our lemonade addend craft provided us the perfect opportunity to bring in some lemonade for our students. If we had more time, we could’ve easily turned this into classroom cooking lesson!

We also brought in watermelon slices when our classes completed the watermelon story problems. It was a sweet treat on a warm Friday afternoon!

Not only do the summer math crafts provide data on student mastery of math concepts, but they look really nice in the hallway on bulletin boards. One reader sent us this photo of a mural she worked on with her students during ESY.

We love that there is so much math on her wall and that the students showed pride in their work! 

Want to check these out for your own classroom? We have all four seasons as well as Christmas, Valentines Day,  Easter, St. Patricks Day.  We have bundled all four seasons together for a discount here...