The days leading up to the holiday season, Thanksgiving through Christmas (or whichever holidays you celebrate!) are exciting, but can also be very distracting. The key to keeping your students’ attention is to provide fun learning opportunities. If you can tie them into the holidays, that’s even better! Here you’ll find some ideas for fun Thanksgiving math activities. This earlier blog post contains some ideas for fun Fall science activities, too.
Thanksgiving math activities
Here’s a fun turkey math activity! Try this free Roll A Feather game.
Students roll a pair of dice and add the numbers. Then they color in the corresponding feather. If the feather is already colored, they miss that turn. Keep going until someone has colored all the feathers.
This graphing activity is really fun if you can get your kids outside! Gather up a big basket of colored leaves while you’re looking for signs of Fall.
Back in the classroom, have students each pick 10 leaves from the basket. Then they can graph the color of each leaf in a histogram or bar graph. You can take this further by comparing all the class data to see which color of leaf is the most and least common.
Use apples as a tasty and healthy way to learn about fractions! Cut up some apples into different numbers of slices. Show your students how the fractions make a whole apple. Cut one apple in half, another in fourths, and then another one into eighths. Now you can use the slices to show how different fractions add up to make others. For example, show how 2/8ths make up 1/4, or how 4/8ths make up one half.
Math Mystery Pictures
These Thanksgiving Math Mystery Pictures Printables for first grade are perfect for reviewing and consolidating Math skills in a fun and engaging way. Students will not need much encouragement to discover what the secret picture is!
Students will use several different math skills to solve the problems that show the mystery picture. Finding the sum, missing addends, time, money, and subtraction are just some of the skills they’ll use.
This resource is perfect to use for sub plans, centers, morning work, or homework. Your students will enjoy these Thanksgiving Math Activities so much that they won’t even know they’re learning!
I also have a set of these for Christmas as well. Christmas Math | Mystery Pictures | Activities | Printables | First Grade
Do you have any favorite Fall math activities? Please share!
