Kids love it any time they get to share something about themselves. So let’s tap into that while sneaking in a little math thinking. Here’s a fun, easy and creative way to have students sign in at your next Family Math Night event…an Our Pets Venn diagram.

A Venn diagram is a graphical organizer that uses circles to compare and contrast two or more sets. The overlapping circles contain common properties.

For this Venn diagram, I thought I’d kick it up a notch and make a Triple Venn Diagram using three circles instead of the usual two circles. And although I didn’t see anyone struggle with where to place their sticker, next time I think I’ll make the individual circles each a different color.

The sets I chose were: Dogs, Cats, Fish. I chose pets because kids love animals. And since one of my staff is artistically inclined I had her draw the cute little pets that went on the graph.

Since I wasn’t sure how many kids would show up for the event, I decided to have them write their initials on a 3/4″ round sticker instead of writing their name in the appropriate spot. And although this photo was taken during the event while kids were still placing on their stickers, I think there was plenty of space for kids to write their name so I’ll also do that next time.

I was curious to see how kids who didn’t have any pets would react to placing on their sticker. But once the first non-pet student added their sticker outside the circles, however, it was easy for the others to follow suit.

Sometimes I include thought questions next to this type of activity so that parents can ask their child math-y questions about the data. I didn’t do that for this one but it would be super easy to include. Questions such as:

• How many kids have a dog only?
• How many more kids have (cats) than (dogs)?
• How many total kids have pets?
• How many kids do not have any pets?
• What have you learned about the students at our Family Math Night event?

This turned out to be a fun, simple way to get kids to sign in to the event. If you like this sign-in idea, we have a lot more!