Pretzel Day - April 26th

Today we celebrated pretzel day.  Since we usually have a morning snack around the time we are doing "home school" we just made today's snack pretzels.  With stick pretzels we did math.  We began by counting 20 pretzels out of the bag (making sure not to skip 15!).  Then we used the pretzels to do manipulative addition and subtracting (ie make piles for 3+4 and count them to get 7).  You could also do multiplication. 

This ended up going a step further as it is a tradition in our house to serve stick pretzels with mini-marshmellows (they like to stick them onto the ends of the pretzels).  My three year old, tore his marmellows into pieces so he could have "more".  This lead into a good discussion about fractions.  I broke one pretzel in half and laid it along side a whole pretzel.  We talked about how two haves could be added together to make one whole.  You could do higher fractions if you are at that level. 

We also used the pretzels to make letters.  When it was time for writing we focused on the "stick" letters that he had made with the pretzels and how to properly form them when writing.  This could be extended to making words. 

A simple day with a snack I already had on hand - just what we needed.