Reading Graphs

• Graphs are commonly used tools for expressing numbers and how numbers relate to one another in different situations. Students will use them throughout their academic careers and will need to read them throughout their lives. You can cut out a few graphs from the daily paper, mount them on cardboard and prepare a few questions about them. These can be questions like "How much did category A increase between point A and point B?" for line graphs, or "which category had the smallest number?" for pie charts.
  
  

Math Practice

• Younger students still learning the basics of addition, subtraction and multiplication need a lot of practice to master the simple equations. You can facilitate this process by having a learning center with dice and a calculator. Pick which operation your students need to work with, depending on what grade level you are teaching. In pairs, students will take turn rolling the dice, then applying your chosen operation to the numbers that come up. The other student will check the first student's answer with the calculator.
  
  

Coordinate Planes

• When students get into high school they will start learning algebra (if not before). Students will learn about charting equations and points on the cartesian coordinate plane, or the x-y graph as it is more commonly known. You can help your students learn this coordinate system early by setting up a learning center with grid paper on which the Cartesian coordinates are already labeled and a series of coordinates. Students draw lines from the first coordinate to each successive one on the list. If a student got all the coordinates right, then his resulting picture will match the one you reveal at the end of the day.
  
  

Metric Cubes

• You can show students how numbers add up by taking wooden cubes and drawing grids on the sides to indicate the number that block represents. For example, a cube with a 10-by-10 grid on each side is 1,000 (since the cube is really 10 10-by-10 squares put together), a cube with a five-by-five grid on each side is 125. It helps if you can set a uniform length of a single unit, so blocks of differing values have proportionally different sizes. You can also have wooden squares with units on each side and single units on top to represent smaller numbers, such as 100. Then, give the students a series of numbers that they will make by combining different blocks to get the same value.