Story: Soup's on! We'll start this morning with Soup Counting. Find a sheet and figure out how many ingredients are in each soup bowl. Coming later this morning.....our first survey!

Suggested manipulatives: Unifix cubes, wooden blocks, centimeter cubes. You’ll also need some clipboards and pencils for the survey.

Prep time: 10 minutes to create the survey document, make some soup bowl scenarios for students to use and put manipulatives on the tables.

Classroom time: Asking children to do their best work for each Math Vitamin assumes that some children will need a longer time than others. Ideally you want to offer a block of time for Math Vitamin projects and have another task available (writing, free exploration, etc.) for those students who finish prior to their peers. For this project allow 20-45 minutes for students to work through all the steps.

How to individualize/stretch: For the students who are beginning to count, give them a soup recipe with very few ingredients. For those children who are beyond 1-1 counting skills, give them more bountiful ingredient combinations for their bowls of soup and have them solve the Soup Counting activity using Cuisenaire rods (five beans would be one yellow rod). Then add all the rods together in a Cuisenaire track to find the sum.