Snowman Poop Math: Practicing Addition and Subtraction

It’s cold here in the Midwest, so it’s no surprise that snow is on our minds.  We’ve gotten a bit so far this season, but not enough for the kiddos to go out and really get to play in it.  This snow deficiency has created an even stronger fascination with it for Bear {5 yrs}.  So, lately, we’ve been doing quite a few activities based on snow.  Our latest was practicing addition and subtraction with snow… or snowman poop to be exact.

Yep, you heard me.  Snowman poop {aka marshmallows}.  Those two words were all it took to tear the little boy away from the Gameboy and bring him right  to our activity table.

In addition to the snowman poop {marshmallows} we also used some of those plastic number refrigerator magnets.  If we had some basic addition and subtraction flashcards, we would’ve used those instead. {Guess what’s in my amazon cart now, though?}

At first I set up easier problems like the one below.  He counted out the appropriate amount pieces to correspond with the numbers that were out.  Then I had him push them together into a combined group to symbolize the addition of the two numbers.  Then he counted how many total he had. Then he placed that number magnet at the end of the problem on the table and read it out loud. 

Since he’s able to count to higher numbers, after he did several problems with small numbers, I started to make them more difficult.  And he chugged right through them.  After a while, we switched to subtraction.  After the marshmallows were laid out under their plastic corresponding numbers, he could complete the problem.  But instead of combining them into a group, he got to eat the amount of snowman poop {marshmallows} that was being subtracted.  Of course, these problems were his favorites because he got to consume some sugary goodness.