What games/activities can I use for a 3rd-4th grade summer math camp for kids?

Question

I'm a senior in high school and I plan on majoring in mathematics education in college. This summer I wanted to hold a summer math camp for 3rd and 4th grade students at my school. It's going to be just a small, probably 3 day camp with each day being 2 or 3 hours long. Some of the topics I wish to discuss are operations, counting, patterns, measurement, fractions, shapes, probability, etc. Any input on activities or games that could be played would be greatly appreciated!

For ex. for the fractions activitiy I'm going to bring in small pies for each student and have them cut the pies into half, and into quarters, thirds, and so on.

Answer 1

Getting students to find the math that occurs in everyday life is really good. Your pie activity for fractions is a good start. Other ideas...

- Measuring objects and their shadows outside to see the ratio between the sizes.

- Cooking - how to increase the amount of each ingredient when you want to increase the total amount of the finished item. So if you had a recipe for 30 cookies, ask the students to find how much of everything you would need to make 10 cookies.

- Sports - shooting basketballs. Freethrows and shooting percentage. Shoot 10 freethrows, calculate the percentage using the fractions.

- You could do things with statistics if you have enough students. Having the students think of some questions like "what is your favorite food" or "who is your favorite actor" and then making  a survey and handing them out to the students and then calculating the percentages and statistics of the survey.

- Shapes - Taking pictures from magazines of common objects so your students can identify the shapes in everyday things. OR a shape scavenger hunt. Give the students 10 shapes to find and tell them they have to find those 10 shapes in the school or in the classroom. They can do it in groups as a competition.

I hope that helps, some of those activities might be too difficult but maybe that can get you started thinking of more!