Worry Doll Math - Culture and Content in the FLES Classroom

This is the fourth post in my serieson how to connect STEM and Spanish. Check out the other posts in this series, Engineering Castells, Experimenting in the Target Language and La migracion de las mariposas. There's also last year's post on Los Reyes Magos and the Hour of Code.

In my effort to combine more STEM into my lesson plans last year I decided to make worry dolls with my first graders. The original plan was to do it around Halloween so we could talk about being afraid and what we were afraid of but things got pushed back and so I had to find a new connection - this time math!

Target vocabulary:

body parts
colors
feelings
numbers 1-100
introductions

When I talked to my classroom teachers they told me after Christmas break that they were working on ones and tens and estimating.  After reading Mundo de Pepita's post about estimating worry dolls, I knew I could easily support what they were learning in the classroom.

To start out with numbers we watched videos on counting by 10s and by 1s. We looked at pictures of chicken buses from Guatemala and counted how many people we saw and listed all the different colors. We also talked about the colors of the Guatemalan flag and found it on my beach ball globe.

Then students designed their own chicken bus. I made "roads" on butcher paper with different numbers and we played a modified version of matamoscas. I called out a number and they had to drive their bus to that "stop."

After they were more comfortable with the numbers we moved on to worry dolls. I had bought a pack of 100 worry dolls from Amazon so I put them in a jar and students had to guess how many they thought were in there. Each day we would count to 100 using the video below. Then students would make their guesses and I would tell them higher or lower. I dragged this out for two weeks (so about 5 classes) and every day they would want to know if today was the day they could finally know how many there really were.

We also worked on body parts. And we practiced introducing ourselves and asking How are you? I read them a short story (in English but a great explanation of the story behind worry dolls.) Finally we counted all the way up to 97 - the number of worry dolls I had in my jar.

Then we made our own. Like a lot of my craftivities this served as a great interpretive listening exercise. Students had to listen to what part of the face I wanted them to do. We used popsicle sticks, googly eyes, markers, pipe cleaners, and yarn. The students wrapped their stick with yarn and I hot glued it at the bottom so it would stay put. Once they were done, they walked around the room and introduced their dolls to one another.

Before we finished the unit we took part of a class period and made activity packs for kids who were muy enfermos y están en el hospital. Each pack had supplies to make their own doll like we had with instructions and some easy Spanish phrases plus a real worry doll from our estimation jar. I later took them down to UK Children's Hospital.

It was a really fun unit and my first graders LOVED it. Do you do anything with worry dolls in your classroom? How do you incorporate math? Leave a comment below or on Twitter using the hashtag #earlylang!