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Inside the Beltway
Jul. 15, 2006
Cheap Shots: Milk Gallon Lids
In my last installment of "Cheap Shots", I wrote about those wonderful
plastic gallon jugs we buy milk (or juice or water) in. Guess
what, each of them comes with a free math manipulative. Yep,
those brightly colored lids are great for pre-math concepts: sorting by
color; making one-to-one correspondence of members of a set (for
example, can you put one blue one on each of these red ones?); identifying groups with the same number, greater number, or lesser number of members; etc.
They are great for early math concepts as well. You
can add or subtract groups. For example, you start with 5 lids
(count them together). The child closes his or her eyes while you
hide 2. The child opens his or her eyes and counts 3 lids and
tries to tell you how many you took. Then you switch roles and
the child hides the lids and you "guess" how many.
Groups of equal number can be added to illustrate
how multiplication is a "shortcut" way of adding equal groups. A
bigger group of lids could be divided into equal groups by "dealing"
the lids out.
The notion of "average" by putting together groups
of unequal number into a "pot" and then divide them equally.
I'm sure you all have a lot of things to use for
math manipulatives. You might enjoy recycling your plastic milk
lids to have some more!
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