Piggies

This activity is a fun, interactive lesson that integrates children's literature with math. (A great way to integrate author studies!) This activity allows students to be involved in all 4 learning styles (visual, auditory, tactile and kinesthetic). I spread this lesson out over two days.

A lesson plan for grade 1 Mathematics

By Stephanie Hatcher

Learn more

• Audery and Don Wood's Clubhouse For more information about Piggies, the authors' website has additional activities.

Related pages

• Join them together/Take them away: The teacher will introduce beginning addition concepts of joining two sets together. The teacher will introduce beginning subtraction concepts of taking away from a set.
• Number combinations: Students will use green and blue craft pom-poms to explore number combinations to five.
• Piggin' out with money: Students will work with money manipulatives to solve word problems that involve adding money amounts and making change. The lesson is introduced with the literature book, Pigs Will be Pigs. After solving the problems posed in the book, the students will work with partners to create their "pig problems". Assessment will require students to solve similar problems on a teacher made worksheet. When time allows, each student will have the opportunity to go to an Internet site to work with money problems and games.

Related topics

• Learn more about addition, arithmetic, hands-on, mathematics, read-alouds, and subtration.

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Learning outcomes

Students will:

• understand the process of subtraction through hands-on manipulation of taking groups apart.
• relate their own funny math stories to a math sentence (7-3=4).
• begin to organize a strategy for finding differences.

Teacher planning

Time required for lesson

90 minutes

Materials/resources

• Piggies by Don and Audrey Wood.
• Adding mats with 2 hands on a solid background. All ten fingers need to be visible.
• 10 Unifix cubes per student.
• Scrap paper
• Puff ball piggies. Piggies are made with 2 pink puff balls glued together. Use felt pipe cleaners to add piggie features.
• 1 pair of gloves (not mittens)
• self-adhesive velcro

Pre-activities

Prior to this, I have already introduced the concept of addition and have given them plenty of opportunities to act out stories using addition. Also, I have introduced the “math sentence” and how that sentence describes the math stories.

Activities

Day One

1. Read Piggies and act out with the gloves and puff ball piggies as you read. (If possible, one adult will read the book while another adult acts out the story.)
2. Reread story. As the pigs begin to go away, stop and (orally) relate the math story to the math sentence. (For instance, “There were 10 piggies. One went away and nine were left. That would be 10-1=9.”) As the story continues, children will notice the pattern of taking away one and stating the appropriate math sentence will be easy. (Sometimes I have my children come and write the sentence on our white board or on individual chalk boards.)
3. Review by emphasizing math sentences must correlate to the math story.

Day Two

1. Reread story. Children may enjoy taking part in acting story out with gloves and piggies.
2. Extend the story idea by making up your own piggie stories and writing appropriate math sentences. As you create your math stories, the children use their workmats and unifix cubes to act out the story (For example, 10-3=7.) Let the children make up their own stories. They can come up to the front of the room and act out their story and write their math sentence on the board while the children act out stories with the workmats and unifix cubes.
3. Children extend this further by writing appropriate math sentences to student’s math stories.

Assessment

I assess the children by observing them during the activities. Most children find the activities fun and it is a great way for them to show me their understandings! Concrete assessment is done by retaining the sentences written in Part 3 of Day 2’s Activities.

Supplemental information

Comments

This lesson works best when another adult can help. My assistant and I do this together.