I’ve moved from a traditional format of math centers to using a booklet format. Students’ first set of centers is primarily on place value and rounding, and their second set of centers covers addition, subtraction, and a lot of activities to build number sense. Then, students’ third set of centers focuses on multiplication.
I love the format and the ease of use of the booklet format, but I really missed incorporating seasonal activities. Since we don’t all teach the same concepts at the same time of year, I didn’t want to replace any set of centers with seasonal centers. Instead, I added a Halloween option to the third set of math centers. This gives us options and flexibility. You can use the Halloween version or you can totally skip it and only use the original. I’ll share more about the original version as soon as I take some pictures. In the meantime, here’s what’s included in the Halloween edition of the Multiplication Math Centers.
As with the other centers in a booklet format, everything can be copied into a single booklet. This way students don’t need to keep up with recording sheets.
Activity 1-Candy Corn Division
This is a great way to review the concept of division. Students take a set number of candy corns and partition it equal into either equal groups or into groups with equal amounts.
Activity 2-Spooky Recipes
In this activity students receive a price list of ingredients for spooky recipes. They use the price list to answer multi-part word problems. This is definitely challenging for students, but they always enjoy this task.
Activity 3-Picture Puzzles
These are also in my number sense booklets, which you can read about here. Of course, this set is a little more challenging and has a Halloween theme. You can see how students work with larger numbers in these puzzles.
Activity 4-Haunted Math
This activity is similar to the game of Clue. Students use deductive reasoning and thinking about 10 and 100 times the value of numbers to determine who stole the candy from the Halloween party and where they hid the candy.
Activity 5-Costume Shop and Activity 6-Fall Festival
Both of these activities are problem solving activities that don’t include any task cards or special materials. It requires a lot of application, and students won’t be able to determine an immediate answer. That often frustrates students, but this problem solving is so important for them.
Activity 7-Halloween Logic
These are so helpful for students-fun too! If they’ve never done anything like this before, you’ll definitely want to model how to complete a few together. Otherwise students will be quite confused. However, once they see what to do, they can quickly catch on.
Activity 8-Geometric Haunted House
In this center students use various geometric terms to create a haunted house. I included a separate page of grid paper that students can draw their house on, as well as example images of each geometric term.
Activity 9-Three Act Task
This is such an awesome and thought provoking activity. I especially love the fact that the Google Form won’t let students move forward without estimates and sharing what they know and need to know. Since it is quite challenging computation, I do let students use the calculator on their Chromebooks for the task.
Center 10-Sweet Math
Students can use actual bags of candy-I highly recommend empty bags-for the activity or use online nutrition fact sources. Students use the information to solve word problems (many multi-step) about the nutrition facts.
Activity 11 & 12-Fall Festival
The final activity takes a little more time to complete than the other activities, so I combined this into two rotations. In the task, students design a fall festival where every booth must have a set perimeter or area. After completing the booth outlines, students can decorate their festival.
You can find these centers here.
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