Story: In this vitamin, students are bridging their understanding of addition with a growing understanding for money values. Their beloved character from the current read aloud book needs some new items and they are working on purchasing various items from a price chart. In the video you see children working with peers as well as checking in with teachers. Some students are shopping with pennies while other students understand that the coins or dollars represent a value. The boy in the video who is working with dollar bills demonstrates a solid understand for the monetary values he is using. This is evident by his ability to explain and document his equation is several different ways.

Suggested manipulatives: For this particular vitamin, using faux money makes the work seem more realistic. Of course you could create you own money system and key with Unifix cubes (or any colored blocks) by creating a “key” for the value of each color block (one color could represent 1cent, another color could represent 5 cents and so on).

Prep time: Adapting the vitamin wording to fit your specific story, putting manipulatives out in the room, and copying the vitamin documentation forms will take about 15-20 minutes. Set up is always more fun and shorter on time if you do this activity with a colleague.

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: When learning to add, students will always need to begin with single units. As their skills develop, have them add more items together. Next, start to introduce the concept of “one” item representing more than one object (one nickel is actually worth 5 pennies). This is a conceptual leap for students. Proceed on to using dollars and larger prices for the items the student needs to buy.

Story:

Suggested manipulatives: Any manipulative that can be broken apart into single units is ideal for beginning counting and addition skills. This means that Unifix cubes, Multilinks, one inch blocks or centimeter cubes are great for 1 to 1 counting and addition work. As students’ skills develop, they are able to start seeing items in groups and eventually to assign related values to the manipulative, such as: one long rod has a value of ten units. At that point, base ten blocks are a perfect next step, as each unit on each block is notched to help students see their counting progress.

Prep time: Adapting the Math Vitamin wording to fit your specific story, putting the manipulative out in the room, creating the grid sheets and copying the student documentation forms will take about 15-20 minutes. Set-up is always more fun and shorter on time if you do this activity with a colleague.

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: For this project, teachers asked individual students to work on 1 to 1 counting skills, learning to pace their verbal counting to align with touching each unit or item. Other students were stretched to begin making groups that matched what they had built while others were even shown how to use multiplication to show set thinking.