Groundhog's Day Fun

Okay friends, when I saw this adorable activity over at The First Grade Parade, I knew I had to adapt it for my little firsties.  You can read Cara's original post here, but the activity involves a fun snowman game for comparing numbers.  She picked two students and gave them 5 seconds to run around the room and gather "snowballs".  They then counted how many snowballs each child collected and compared the numbers using greater than, less than, and equal signs.  So fun! Last week my little ones were working on place value and comparing 2 digit numbers.  Since Saturday was Groundhog's Day, I merged Cara's game with some first grade skills and some Groundhog's Day fun.  Here is what I came up with ...!

We learned that Groundhog's eat mostly grasses, berries, and nuts.  The kids sat in a circle around our carpet area, and I scattered about groups of berries (tens) and acorns (ones).  I then chose a pair of students and gave them about 10 seconds to gather as many nuts and berries as they could.  I told them they had to get at least one group of berries and one acorn (little smarties quickly started going only for the berries!) 

After time was up they placed their collections on the poster in the middle of the rug. (Okay don't make fun of my drawing, I am sadly non-artsy!)  We used our place value skills to determine how much food each child had gathered, and which pile the hungry groundhog would like to eat (the bigger one of course!).  We then turned our inequality sign in the proper direction.  The rest of the class was given a recording sheet to write each problem we created:

 

Click above for your copy.

The kids had SO much fun with this game!  They didn't want to stop playing :)  I'm linking up with Classroom Freebies today to offer you the materials I used for the game. Click on the picture above for your copy.  Hope you enjoy!