3 More Warm Ups with Craft Sticks

I' love sharing ideas for math warms ups with you! Effective warm-ups are fast, interactive and hands-on. They use practical equipment and target essential foundational skills. Once you teach them, play them over and over for essential repetition.



Today I have 3 more for you that can be easily played with craft sticks. Have a supply ready and store them in a math drawer, caddy, case or cup. 




Tell a Story

  • tell a math story and have students act out the math with the sticks
  • they take a bunch to start and listen to you before moving their sticks
  • language based math stories are essential for learning to understand and interpret more complex math problems later
  • integrate as much math language as possible, gradually over the year to encourage a broad understanding of how different math questions may be asked by phrasing your stories differently - e.g. in an addition story, you may use these and more: how many, whats the total, join, combine, added to
  • e.g. Emily built a fence with sticks. She first put 2 sticks up, then another 3 before adding the last 6. How many sticks in Emily's fence?

Number Order

  • write numbers on your craft sticks
  • let students each take a small bunch
  • on 'go' they flip their sticks and order them from smallest to largest number

Divide

  • start building a foundation for division with sharing and repeated subtraction
  • give a student a set number - e.g 12 sticks
  • ask them to 'share' the sticks between the students at your small group table
  • talk about a fair-share in math being that everyone gets an equal number of sticks
  • review 'equality' as a math concept if needed