4 Simple Back to School Math Activities

Greeter, organizer, consoler, caretaker, planner of 25 lives, what role doesn’t the teacher have? Especially during the first week of school when you’re ushering in a new wave of parents and students while trying to plan, prep, and oversee everything in your classroom.  

In those times, you need back to school activities and printables that occupy students while you take care of business around the classroom. Math is a great subject for accomplishing this.

There are a few things to consider when choosing back to school math activities to ensure a productive start from day one. Here are some questions to ask yourself before prepping and making copies…

1. Can the students complete this activity independently?
2. Will this printable take 2 seconds or occupy a decent chunk of time?
3. How will this support math instruction for later in the year?
4. Can I promote classroom community through these activities?

Thankfully, you won’t likely be tied to teaching new math content during that first week of school, so you can maximize time with activities that review last year’s skills.

These 4 simple back to school math activities can be completed during that first week of school to check off all 4 questions listed above.

Math Find a Friend

Math Find a Friend is a creative way for students to get to know each other and find comfort in meeting new people while practicing essential addition skills. 

In the activity, each student makes a bracelet from a pipe cleaner and pony beads. You could pass out a certain amount of beads to students or let them choose their addends. For example, Ruby has 5 pink beads and 4 blue beads. Ruby has ten beads in total. 

Once students have made their bracelets, they walk around the classroom to find a new friend. Once they meet, they show each other their bracelets. They will record that student’s name, beads, and addition equation that was made.

So, you’re working on addition and classroom community at the same time. I love a good two-for-one deal, don’t you?

Draw and Solve Word Problems

Word problem booklets are a great way for students to practice their problem-solving skills, and the booklet eats up a nice chunk of time. You can use them to introduce your expectations for word problems or allow students to explore problem-solving independently. 

You’ll gain an initial observation of how your students solve word problems to use when building on this skill later. With the booklets, students will read a word problem, identify important information, draw to solve, and write an equation with their answer.

Partner Games to Review Skills

How to work well with their classmates may not come naturally to your students. Provide opportunities for students to practice working together using back to school math activities that include simple math games for partner work. 

I’m especially partial to games where students find numbers to work with using dice or spinners. It keeps the game intriguing, building curiosity and excitement between the pairs.

Also, it’s a great way to build cooperative learning skills while reviewing math content. These partner games can be used throughout the year to promote fact fluency and mental math.

Solve and Sort Equations

Solve and sort equations activities provide a self-checking element built into it. Self-checking activities are a great way to encourage and allow student independence while allowing them to correct any errors before settling on a final answer.

This Making Numbers Flap Book is a simple and effective solve-and-sort math activity for the first week of school. In this activity, students solve equations and sort them by their sum. 

The beauty of these back to school math activities is they can be time-intensive too,  thanks to the multi-step flow. Students solve the equations, cut and fold their flap-book, and color everything by code. 

This gives you back more time in the day!

For more back-to-school inspiration, check out my favorite back-to-school picture book with reading lessons!

Don’t forget these simple back to school math activities to save you time! Save the image below for later.