LS and IS Students Conduct the Great Cube Grab of 2025

Students in 1st and 4th grades gathered for an experience in mathematics using handfuls of cubes as learning tools.

As 4th graders work with “data” in math, teacher Maureen Cuesta looks for ways to allow her charges to tabulate different sets of data based on the world around them. For example, they break down the contents of their Chex Mix snack and count up the specific number of each item in the mix.

Because students in the two grades have different-sized hands, a handful of anything they grab will always be different between them. Building on success from previous years, 4th grade students welcomed their 1st grade counterparts from Bev “Greenie” Greenberg’s class to use math counting cubes for exploring such questions as how much is in a handful and how to quantify and compare the capacity of one’s handful.

Each 4th grader paired up with a 1st grade partner. Teachers demonstrated the assignment by dropping one of their hands crane-style into a large tub of math counting cubes and grabbing as many cubes as possible before removing their hand and emptying its contents onto one side of a plastic tray. Partners repeated the process, then counted their cubes to see how many more a 4th grade hand could grab compared to a 1st grade hand. Fourth graders used the data to create bar and line graphs.

The room was alive with the sounds of laughter and learning as students worked together grabbing, stacking and comparing. Older students helped younger peers quantify the results of their work, and all had fun while reinforcing math skills and building community between grade levels.

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