Want a fun, hands on math activity for your students to celebrate Earth Day on April 22? This Earth Day Geoboard activity can provide a FUN review of a variety of math skills.
Do you have a stash of geoboards collecting dust in your closet? Well, get ready to pull them out as your students create images to celebrate Earth Day! This set of hands on math challenges will help your students compose shapes, count, add and create a simple bar graph. This is a great way to take a break from your normal math routine & focus on ways to care for our planet (while also weaving in some important math concepts ;)). And as a bonus, little learners can strengthen those fine motor skills too!
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Materials Needed for Earth Day Geoboard Activity Pages:
Geoboard for each student (you can grab a set on Amazon here if you don’t have any yet)
Large bag of rubber bands in a variety of colors (you can likely find rubber bands at the dollar store, but for a good variety of colors, try this set or something similar)
Printed student handouts (grab for free in my shop using the link at the end of the post)
How to Use the Earth Day Geoboard Pages:
This download includes 10 different images for students to create using rubber bands on their geoboard. To begin, students choose a picture and recreate it on their geoboard.
Images Included:
Leaf
Sun
Flower
Earth
Trash Can
Tree
Lightbulb
Plant
Watering Can
Faucet
Once they’ve created the image with rubber bands, they create a bar graph by counting the number of rubber bands they used for each color in their design.
Finally, they add all the values together to find the total number of rubber bands.
The activity is pretty straightforward once you print and gather all the materials.
A quick note: Color images AND black and white images are included, allowing you to choose how to present this to students.
If you have matching colors and you think it will be easier for students to see & recreate the pictures, give them the color pages and corresponding colors of rubber bands.
However, if you want this to be more open ended & allow for more creativity from your students, provide the black and white pictures.
Students can then choose their own colors to create each design and everyone’s bar graphs will be different.
One final note: You may also want to encourage students to create their own design for a particular object, rather than copying the design shown exactly.
This will challenge them to find another way to make a picture on their geoboard and see new ways to compose shapes.
For example, you may have them design their own flower and then compare it to the flower picture shown on the activity page.
Discussion Questions: Earth Day Math
As students create their designs, or after everyone is finished, it would be good to discuss the activity together, both to reflect on Earth Day and also tie in some math concepts. Here are some ideas to get you started:
How does your picture relate to Earth Day? How does it remind you to care for our planet?
Which picture used the greatest number of rubber bands?
Which picture used the least?
What shapes do you see in your picture?
How many rectangles do you see? How many squares? How many line segments?
I hope this provides a fun Earth Day math challenge for your students! But if you’re wanting even more ways to combine math + Earth Day, check out the resources below. There’s something for a variety of ages!
And if you’re ready to try out the Earth Day Geoboard Activity, use the link below to grab it FREE in my shop! Enjoy!
{Click HERE to go to my shop and grab the FREE Earth Day Geoboard Activity for Grades K-2!}
