What it is: Balancing Animals is another fun activity for your interactive whiteboard that lets students use animals as ‘non-standard’ units to weigh others. Students can drag an animal (or animals) up to the scale, other students try to balance the scale by choosing animals that would cause the scale to be balanced.
How to integrate Balancing Animals into the classroom: Balancing Animals is a nice visual for students to use to learn about weight. Choose an animal to weigh and drag it to the scale. Encourage students to whisper a guess of how many animals it would take to balance the scale to their elbow buddy (the student next to them). Groups of students can come to the board and test out their guesses. This game could be completed on an interactive whiteboard or on classroom computers as a math center.
Tips: iboard has a variety of activities for the interactive whiteboard that can be purchased. Balancing Animals is one of their freebie samples.
Leave a comment and share how you are using iboard: Balancing Animals in your classroom.
This would be a fun activity to use with 5th/6th grade students studying variables. Ahead of time, the teacher could weigh the animals and assign values to each animal based on their relation to one another. For example in the screen shot shown, if the dog equals eight, then the students need to figure out that the cats must equal two since there are four of them.
Thanks for sharing this resource!
Awesome idea, I think this is a great tool to teach variables with!