Journal Entry #11

Saturday, Dec 9, 2006

M&M candy count


I never realized what power there was in a bag of M&Ms!!! Sarah, I want to thank you for bringing in this exercise. Firstly I blew it big time by forgetting to make more copies for everyone. I had four of each sheet (grouping and graphing). Since I had eight students it still worked. Some of the boys did not want to color, but the four sheets were colored in the matter of minutes.

I don’t think they knew what exactly was coming next. I was in such a hurry to surprise the students with the M&Ms that I filled some of the cups with more M&Ms than the graph could handle. The students were at first very reluctant to put their M&Ms on the colored circles. Some students actually lined their corresponding colored M&M around the circle so it wouldn’t be “in the crayon.” So I asked questions like “How many red ones do you have, red ones and blue ones, etc.” The student able to answer the question first got to eat one.

From this point there was a counting frenzy and I soon felt like Skinner himself. The more reinforcements I allowed (the M&Ms of course), the more the students were jumping out of their seats to answer my questions.