Pack Your Classroom with Learning Activities

Get Organized for Summer

As the school year draws to a close, many teachers a thinking about packing up their classroom. Whether you’re staying in the same room and want things ready for the fall or moving to another grade or another school, keeping things neat and organized will help get the next year off to a good start.

Packing up manipulatives can be particularly time- and space-consuming. We’ve got a few suggestions that will make the process easier and even…fun!

Get Students Involved

Don’t shoulder the burden of packing up by yourself. Students are willing and often eager to help get things organized. Get out the water table or smaller basins of water and have the students help clean and dry your plastic and foam manipulatives, like Unifix cubes and pattern blocks. They get to play in the water, and you get clean manipulatives that are ready for the start of another year.

Make Packing a Learning Activity

Students can practice math concepts while helping to pack. Use simple sorting activities to have students organize manipulatives by size, shape, or color, placing them into labeled bins. These kinds of activities reinforce what students have already learned about sorting and attributes.

Other activities can reinforce counting and place value concepts. After sorting, students can group manipulatives like counting bears into fives or tens and practice counting by these groups. Objects that link together, like Unifix or Omnifix cubes, can be made into stacks of ten for easy storage. As students count the manipulatives they place them into labeled containers and then record the total they counted. See below for some sample counting activities adapted from the Mathematics with Unifix Cubes books.

Match Me Classroom Activity

First to Twenty Classroom Activity

First to Fifty Classroom Activity

Counting activities naturally lead to addition and multiplication activities for older students. Addition problems that focus on parts of 50 or 100 are good practice for students, and also work for parts of 30, 40, 60, and so on. Multiplication advances the idea of counting by fives or tens to looking at groups of five or ten and finding the product. As with the counting activities, students should record the number of manipulatives they have organized.

Keep Things Organized

Organizing and storing manipulatives takes effort, but the big payoff comes when you unpack in the fall. Make it easier to find the manipulatives you need by labeling both the contents and quantity of the manipulatives in each container. Using see-through containers like clear plastic storage tubs or baskets make it easier to find what you need when you need it. You can also store your manipulatives in groups by unit, keeping those that are used later in the year together.

Whatever method you choose to organize and store your manipulatives, take the time to involve your students in the process and get summer off to a clean and organized start!