Jelly Bean Fun

I had great fun doing this activity with Master 4 as it gave him the opportunity to be able to estimate, count and create a graph using individual jelly beans. This is a favourite of mine that I have used many times when teaching. Children love "real" maths and what more can be real than getting to eat a few jelly beans at the end of your activity! The activity itself has many numeracy opportunities: counting, colour recognition, estimating, graphing, mathematical language development (more/less)

To complete the activity you just need a packet of Jelly Beans and a graphing sheet. Place all the Jelly Beans in the middle of a piece of paper and get your child to sort them into colours.

Introduce the term "estimate or guess" to your child. Get him/her to estimate how many there are of each colour before actually counting them.

Using the Jelly Bean graphing Template talk to you child about what a graph is and why we use them. Then colour the bottom row showing what coloured Jelly Beans you will be graphing. Then get your child to place the jelly beans on the graph one colour at a time. Explain that you can count the total number of each colour individually or you can read the number along the side (if they are at this stage).

Once your child has counted the number of each coloured jelly bean total get them to write the total. This is a great opportunity for those children who are ready to start writing numbers.