Celebrate Spring with Sumdog

If your students haven’t already noticed, for the month of May, we have swapped out Cannonball for one of our subscriber-only games – Flower Defenders. This is a perfect game to celebrate spring being in full bloom!

To go along with the springtime theme, we have created a series of math puzzle downloads, many of which contain items students will recognize from the Sumdog Garden. Downloads are available for grades K-2, 3-5, and 6-8.

If students complete one or more of the printable activities, you can reward them with extra coins to decorate their Sumdog 3D Garden.* Have students take screenshots of their decorated Sumdog gardens, print them out, and hang them in your classroom or in the halls. They make perfect springtime decorations! Feel free to share pictures of your students’ gardens with us on Twitter.

Here are some other ways you can incorporate math (and science) into springtime at school:

• Have students count out seeds and put them into arrays. If you have a school garden, plant the seeds there, or send them home with students to plant.
• Go outside and mark students shadows in chalk at different points during the day. This is a great way to practice telling time, as well as discuss the sun’s position in the sky relative to the Earth’s rotation.
• Track the weather outside for a week or more. You might even want to look at historical data for a conversation about statistics. You can discuss the probability of events like rain, as well as percentages like humidity. There are many opportunities to create graphs – everything from simple bar graphs, to box-and-whisker plots.
• Look at the sunrise and sunset times for your area. Discuss the reasons why these change throughout the year and practice calculating elapsed time.
• Organize a spring cleanup around your school grounds! Tally the different types of trash you collect, separating recyclables from non-recyclables. Practice using a scale and weigh all that you collect.
• Make birdfeeders or ecosystems out of recycled bottles or other recyclable materials. Discuss concepts like measurement and volume in the process.
• Go on a nature walk around your school grounds. Discuss area and perimeter along the way. Keep track of the total distance you go and use it to make measurement conversions back in the classroom.

*Rewarding extra coins is a premium feature

Don’t have a Sumdog account?