Bright Ideas-Motivating Math Manipulatives

This is the first year I have heard these words from my students about story problems.  (Actually, it is the first time I have felt this way about story problems)  What is the difference?

 I wish I would have used this Bright Idea years ago!

All year long I have been posting about our individual themes for problem solving (under problem solving with story boxes) but today I want to focus on our math manipulatives for story problems and how motivating they have been for our students.  For each theme, my teammate (Natalie) and I created manipulatives to match.  We really feel that this has helped our students to visualize and connect to the problems.  This visualization helps them to determine if it is an addition, subtraction, multiplication, or missing addend problem. 

 So jumping right in....Bus Theme

 These are just lids.  I used a Sharpie and some stickers to make them look like people.  We used these manipulatives in our small groups for each story problem.  Our students used the lima beans below as their "people."

Fall theme:

The pumpkins and ghosts are just buttons that we found at Joann Fabrics.  Then we used spider rings but cut off the ring part.  These were small and could be moved around quickly!

Giving theme:

These "gift boxes" were made using the cube blocks.  We had our students paint all the blocks with sparkly red and gold paint.  Then we glued ribbons on some of the "gifts."
This theme included some problems with groups of tens and ones.  So we wrapped up some of the rectangular prism blocks.  Our students knew that each of these large packages contained 10 small gifts.

Teddy Bear Store Theme:
We introduced this theme by asking the students to be the teddy bears.  They each held up these sticks with the bears attached.

 For individual practice they used little bear manipulatives.

All of these materials have helped to bring our instruction to life this year.  What kind of materials do you use to help your students visualize story problems?  We would love to add more ideas to our collection!

Thanks for joining me for the Bright Ideas Blog Hop!

 

Next stop...my fellow Ohio blogger, Kate, from EduKate and Inspire!  She will describe a very engaging writing and art project with shaving cream snowmen! Just click on her image below to head on over there.

Enjoy the hop! I can't wait to learn from everyone's different BRIGHT ideas!

An InLinkz Link-up

An InLinkz Link-up