Story:The bean shop is having quite the quandary! We ran through those beans so quickly that they need to reorder at the bean shop. First, we need to take inventory of how many different beans we have. Take a scoop, sort them by variety, and record how many of each bean you have!

Suggested manipulatives: A variety of dried beans, if possible. Otherwise, use centimeter cubes in a large bowl and create a key stating what type of bean is represented by each color.

Prep time: Shopping for beans could require a special trip to the store. Otherwise, 10 minutes to create a bowl of centimeter cube beans and a key for bean names.

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 work prior to their peers. For this project allow 20-45 minutes for students to work through all the steps.

How to individualize/stretch: Your goal with this Math Vitamin is to get children to begin grouping items by tens. You may still have some students who are working on beginning counting. For them, put several beans in front of them and ask them to count and document the color categories of those beans on their Math Vitamin sheet. For those needing a stretch, have them take several scoops of beans, sort by bean type (using the key), count, make trades for each type of bean and document how many of each type of bean. Next, they can recombine all the beans together and count the total by tens, hundreds, etc...