Jelly Bean Math

What You Need:

• Bag of jelly beans (variety bag, with at least 4 flavors)
• Medium sized plastic storage container
• Notepad
• Pen or pencil
• 2 sheets of card stock or construction paper
• Crayons
• Jelly bean graphing page (make your own with our worksheet generator)

What You Do:

1. Ask your preschooler to pour about ½ of the bag of jelly beans into the medium sized plastic container.
2. Help her identify the colors and associated flavors.
3. Ask her to make predictions: How many total jelly beans are in the jar? How many are there of each color? Record her predictions on a notepad.
4. Dump the jelly beans, count and sort by color.
5. Help your child make a graph on card stock or construction paper that shows how many jelly beans she counted of each color.
6. Talk about her predictions.
7. Next, let your child have the pleasure of using her senses! Have your child close her eyes and taste-test one jelly bean of each color, guessing the flavor of each. Record her answers on the notepad.
8. Repeat step 7 with her eyes open, using the power of sight, and compare results and discuss. Advance this activity by using the entire bag of jelly beans. Count and sort by groups of 5, 10 or 20 -- a wonderful skill builder and yummy too! Or, take a survey of family members. How many jelly beans do they think are in the jar? Who was closest?