Kansas: Sunflower math

Our math lesson for this week was tally marks, and I knew that if I made them learn how to count tally marks using the textbook they’d get all freaked out, so instead we pulled out our dry erase boards and made tally marks as we counted different objects. It was a most satisfying tally marks math lesson.

Then we read a bunch of books about sunflowers.

I had a BRILLIANT IDEA!

If you’re thinking of running in terror, that’s my husband’s usual response to a brilliant idea like this.

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Our Sunflower tally marker activity

Ages ago I made a seed sorting kit for the kiddos (I’m gonna have to rewrite that post because the one it’s currently linked to serves no purpose whatsoever), and so I ran upstairs and unearthed it.

Then, I gave each kid a small pot full of seeds and had them sort out the sunflower seeds and count how many they had using tally marks.

After we’d practiced with just the sunflower seeds all week, on the final day they had to count up how many total seeds there were with tally marks for each pot full of seeds.  That was quite a challenge, but it made an otherwise boring subject fun.

This was also part of our newest state study, let’s see if anyone can guess what state……..

Extension activities for a tally mark lesson

Of course, you can count all manner of things, your toys, get a bag of LEGOs and count how many there are of different colors or shapes. The list does go on and on.

Then pull it into a probably apocryphal, but none the less fun real-world story of using tally marks with Tricking the Tally Man, a great story of a small town trying to keep down their taxes.