Christmas Math Projects: Math Paper Chains and Advent Calendars

I found the draft of this blog post today--I forgot that I never finished it! Things always get so crazy around the holidays, don't they? Maybe I can adapt this activity for Lent to make it more seasonally appropriate :)

I love creating special holiday activities for my math club. Before Christmas I wrote about the octahedron ornaments that my students made. So now that Christmas is a distant memory and there are signs of spring in the air, I finally found time to write about my other math Christmas project: paper chains! I love making paper chains. I do not, however, love cutting 400 strips of construction paper. But it's worth it when I see how excited my kids are as they assemble their chains.

In order to justify spending a day making paper chains, I had to find a way to make them extra math-y. Last year I came up with the idea of putting a Christmas word problem on each link of the chain. The chains have 17 links--one for each day that we are on Christmas break. The students remove one link each day of Christmas vacation and solve the word problem on the link. In January, I give them a treat if they bring back all seventeen problems (solved, of course). The students eat this up! One boy told me yesterday that he's already done 12 of the problems!

Here are the Christmas word problems I wrote:
Math Christmas Paper Chain

The students cut them out (this year I drew lines between the problems, but I couldn't find my master copy to scan in) and glue them on red and green strips about an inch and a half wide. I let them make patterns if they want. And I have them write their initials on the back of each strip so that they don't get mixed up in our frenzy of cutting, gluing, and stapling.

The students were so excited to bring their deconstructed and solved paper chains to me when we came back to school after Christmas break. The assignment was optional, and about 2/3 of my math club completed it. I let them choose something special out of my prize bag (thank you, Dollar Tree, for your never ending supply of foam footballs and giant pencils).

Our paper chains in various stages of completion.

For my kindergarten enrichment group, I created math Advent calendars. A friend brought me a spare copy of this Advent calendar:
Advent Calendar

I printed it on 11x17 paper and made tiny holiday-themed math problems for each space. I laminated the calendars, and the students created little numbered "doors" for their calendar. Here are the math problems:
Advent Math Problems

And here's a picture of the laminated calendar:

Happy belated holidays! Maybe someone will stumble upon this blog post in time to use these ideas next Christmas!