Generalizing Math & Language Skills

This time of year is the perfect time to do more arts and crafts activities. Art projects give you the so many opportunities to work on generalizing math and language skills!! Here are a couple math crafts that we will be doing this month and the which skills we will be targeting.

The first craft task we will be doing is making and decorating Christmas stockings. I prep this activity a couple different ways depending on the needs of the group. If I need to target color identification and requesting skills, then I have a variety of colored paper or stockings pre-cut from a variety of colored paper. Students would have to request the stocking or colored paper that they would like for their project.

If I am targeting cutting and tracing skills, then I would have the students trace and or cut the stockings out themselves. In my current group, I have a few students who aren’t ready to do this amount of cutting. For them, the materials are cut while other students have to cut their own out.

 Next, students will each get a different math problem based on their skill level.  They glue the while part of the stocking onto their stocking.

Again, some of my students are able to draw while others are not. For students who can’t yet draw, I give them circles to glue onto their stocking. Students need to make groupings or sets to illustrate and figure out the answer to the addition sentence. Here the student glued on circles:

In this picture, the student drew his own circles.

Whether the student glued the circles on or drew them, the last step is to count up the circles and write the answer on the line.

Another math craft we do is to make a patterned fireplace. You can adapt and modify the complexity of this craft by changing the pattern that the student needs to make or extend.

You can add in following directions practice by directing the student to decorate the fireplace in specific ways. For example, “Make orange fire in the black square.” or “”Draw black hooks above each stocking.”

You can read more about using crafts to practice math and language skills by clicking {HERE}.