This morning we  put aside worksheets  and improvised  a new way of doing math , just to do something different and add some on hands experience that kids could remember.

Can you guess what we used?

I give you a clue : we live in Italy . No, no  we didn’t cut pizza to learn fractions… (did it already some time ago…)

What else do you think of when you talk about Italy? Spaghetti ? that’s right !

The truth is that I didn’t have time to plan the math lesson the evening before and while doing breakfast dishes  my eyes met a pack of spaghetti …. Sudden inspiration!  Here we have a math activity for big and small!

A few whole spaghetti and some halves for each child

This activity adapted  perfectly for teaching multiple levels . We reviewed the polygon families, with the boys while the little sister stayed busy building all kind of things long after completing  her task  of constructing  some basic shapes.

We then continued all together by playing , learning and experimenting with lines and segments.

The main part of the lesson was introducing the terms of parallel lines and perpendicular lines  and learning how to build them.

In conclusion , we had fun , learned and reviewed a lot of geometry vocabulary , and I’m sure that this on hands activity will stay in their memory!

Did you ever use some fun, out of the box manipulative or objects for a math lesson ? tell us in the comments so we can have fun sharing Ideas!

If you like hands on math activities check out this free printable games for place value.

Or this STEM task Cards for Fractions with Lego!

You can get them on my TPT shop here: Fraction and Lego task cards 

Or for free if you subscribe to my blog ! By clicking on the picture at the end of the article.

Get your  Task Cards  for free by clicking on the picture:

STEM Fraction task cards with Lego or Duplo
Kids will visualize and understand fraction as they play with Lego !
This activity is composed of 16 task cards and some answer keys.
Just print and cut the cards and answer keys, bring some Lego or Duplo bricks and the hands-on activity is ready.
The fraction word problems of each task card needs be resolved while building them in Lego. Kids follow instructions to build tours, castles, buildings and visualize how to represent, add and compare the fractions .

Math is fun !