Quick Math Station Activity

I was scanning the clearance aisle at Wal-Mart today and found a pack of large die cut apples for 50 cents! So I made number puzzles to put in math stations this week since it is Johhny's birthday and all. I made one for numbers 1-10. I'm thinking I need to go on and make 11-20 for my higher kids.

We've been slowly working on addition strategies and finding as many combinations of each number as we can. So this activity will be a good review/reinforcement of what we've been practicing. Here's a picture from a few weeks ago when we were working on making 5's.

This game is called "shake and spill". The kids put 5 counting chips in a cup, shake them up, spill them, color  what they spilled, and then write an equation. That orange thing is a little foam mat so the counting chips don't hit their desks and make so much noise, but if they all had their notebooks out like this little guy I guess that would've worked too. Also, 21 kids shaking up counters in a cup is almost deafening so I don't know why I even tried to make the spilling part quiet. It made sense at the time.

On another note, did anyone know that Wal-Mart now has a 97 cent area much like Target's dollar bins? I'm not loving it as much as Target's but I give them an E for effort and there were some very cute teachery notepads, stickers, bookmarks, and tote bags. I bought some super cute cupcake sticky notes and plastic (reusable, not throw away) plates for a friend's upcoming birthday. Maybe I'll fill the plates with cupcakes or maybe I'll try and make one of these cake stands I've seen on pinterest. Anyone tried this yet?