I read the book Hershey Kisses Addition to the students. We discussed some math vocabulary--plus, equals, sum, etc. Then I gave each student a baggie of Hershey hugs and kisses and a workmat that they took back to their desks.

 I asked them to take out three candies and tell me the combination of hugs and kisses that they had used to make 3. I entered their combinations on a chart I had prepared. I moved on to the sum of 4 and 5 and did the same. Then I asked them to note how many different ways we had made those sums. They noticed that the number of ways had grown by one each time. I then asked them to predict the number of ways they could make 6 and they thought seven. We then did the sum of 6 and found that their prediction of 7 had been correct. We continued on (taking a break half way through) to the sum of 10, finding combinations and making predictions.

 After a break we met at the computer and entered the data for the number of ways for each sum and created a graph using the new MaxCount (Scholatic Keys Excel) program. We were able to see visually how the number of combinations grew by one for each of the sums we had done.

 Later in the day the students played the Hershey Counting game and practiced what they had learned about combinations for making the sum of five. The following day we worked together making a MaxShow (Scholastic Keys Power Point) of our project with nearly 20 slides. The students sequenced the pictures and thought of captions for the pictures while I worked the program. (Since I had put the pictures onto slides earlier in the day this process went quite quickly--a half hour at most.) We will be sharing that show with parents. (Note--the one submitted here to the chocolate project is my own abbreviated version since we were limited to five slides.)

 Note:  If you do not have PowerPoint on your computer, click here to download a free PowerPoint viewer.

The last thing I asked the students to do related to this project was an individual project using MaxWrite (Scholastic Keys Word). They worked independently on the computer inserting graphics of kisses I had created in the paint part of the program then typing the addition sentence(s) for the number of kisses they had used. They love doing projects on the computer!