A Kindergarten Smorgasboard of French Fry Subtraction!

Happy Monday!  Was it another Manic Monday in your classroom today?  After today I have 6 more Mondays!  Not that I’m counting!

Last week my friend Faith from Kindergarten Faith did a guest post for me where she shared an amazing and fun and engaging and glittery fabulous idea for subtraction.  I was so excited that I made sure to include this activity in my plans.  We did this amazing activity today and it was a HUGE hit!  Like Faith says, there is great power when we connect the common core standards to real life things our students can relate to!

What was this great activity?  Well I call it French Fry Take Away!  Here’s what we did (again a HUGE thank you to Faith!)

Each monster got a red square/rectangle and wrote an M on the paper.  Then they glued three sides to the paper (leaving the top open and free!).  I then gave them 10 “french fries” were just yellow pieces of paper.  As soon as they saw the yellow strips they yelled “MCDONALDS!”

To do the subtraction part of the activity, I would tell them a story (yes, so we could work on story problems!!!  Common Core…we got this!) using their names and french fries.  For example:  “Mr. Greg had 10 french fries.  He was so hungry he ate 5 french fries.  How many did he have left?”  We would write the number sentence on the board and use our french fries to solve the problem.

Everyone was engaged and even the monsters who have struggled with this concept had an aha moment!  There is power in french fries!

And yes, I did have one monster ask “Can we eat our fries now?”   Honey, if you wanna eat paper go right ahead!  HMMMM I wonder if McDonald’s would give us real fries to eat now that we’ve advertised with them?!