No Manipulatives? No Problem!
Math Manipulatives You Already Have at Home
Did you know you can make math manipulatives out of dozens of household items? You don’t have to spend a small fortune ordering supplies to create your own math curriculum.
Most of the math manipulatives you already have in your home are geared for early childhood, elementary, and middle school learning. It is a little harder to apply calculus concepts with matchbox cars or small snack food items. However, there are wonderful online tools that provide visual examples and explicit teaching to reinforce higher math concepts. Check out the table below for a handful of math skills that you can teach and practice with common household items that double as math manipulatives.
| Math Manipulatives | Math Skill | What To Do |
|---|---|---|
| Matchbox cars/Wooden blocks/Zoo animals | Counting | Count by 1s, 2s, 5s, and 10s |
| Counting bears/ Colored Legos/ Stickers/ Beads/ Craft sticks | Matching quantity to numerals | Match a number of items to a written number on a flashcard, such as 5 counting bears to the number 5 |
| Buttons/ Rocks/ Twigs/ Small snack food items (goldfish, M&Ms, etc.) | Sorting | Sort items by color, shape, size, texture, or another category |
| Beans/ Dominoes/ Shoes | Solving problems by addition and subtraction | Use items to represent numbers in addition and subtraction problems to |
| Home Decor – furniture, picture frames, plates, flooring patterns | Observe shapes in the real world | Record home decor items and classify them by their attributes: shape name, number of angles, and number of sides. |
| Ruler, measuring tape | Use standard units of measure | Use the ruler or measuring tape to measure 20 different things in your home or yard. Make a table to record the items and their standard measurement. Be sure to include units. For upper elementary and middle school students, list measurement in standard and metric units of measure. |
| Craft sticks, sippy cups, shoes, or even a sibling to measure lengths or quantities | Use non-standard units of measure | Pick an item such as a shoe. Measure a given distance in shoes (e.g., the length of this room is 22 shoes). Make a table to record items and their non-standard units of measure. |
| Deck of cards | Compute with integers | Black cards are positive integers and red cards are positive integers. Each player draws a card and the cards ‘face-off’ with addition, subtraction or multiplication problems. Ex: 5 x 7 = 5 x (-7) = -35. Each player records his or her answer on a whiteboard or piece of paper. |
| Analog clock | Tell and write time | Practice saying the time at various points of the time. Learn to use “ten til” and “quarter after” phrases. |
| Sticky notes or dot stickers to create line plots and bar graphs | Represent and interpret data | If a younger sibling is potty training, have the older sibling create a bar graph on a poster paper or other paper to represent number of times the toddler uses the potty. Challenge your middle school child to do push-ups every day. Do the push-ups with your child. Create a line plot to represent how many push-ups your child completed each day for a 7-day period, use sticky notes or dot stickers to represent the data. | Dollar bills, coins | Solve word problems with dollar bills, quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies | Make a pretend store with a few desirable items from your pantry (fruit snacks, a chocolate chip cookie, etc). List a price for these items. Give your child a few coins or a couple of dollar bills and have her practice paying for the food and calculating how much change she should get back. Practice skip counting by 5s or 10s with nickels or dimes | Dollar bills, coins | Solve word problems with dollar bills, quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies | Give your middle school child a budget of $50 (or another amount) to purchase groceries. Ask her to select food items for the family for the week from Instacart or Clicklist while staying under budget. For advanced students, include a meal planning component to ensure ingredients match meal plan and stay within budget. |