Comparing Lengths and Amounts; longer, shorter, more, or less.

Our activities this week were about comparing; we read Chrysanthemum and then counted the letters in her name and in our own names. We played a grab and count game that let us compare two grabs to see which hand held more cubes, and recorded our results. Finally, we had a "longer" and "shorter" classroom hunt, and the children measured their tower of 10 cubes against a number of objects and sorted them according to "longer" and "shorter."

 And now, a word about dot to dots. You may have noticed a few dot to dots lately coming home with your children. Sometimes something grabs a student, in this case all of the students, and we need to run with it. In the kindergarten classroom, it's dot to dots, so I decided to look closely at what happens when the K's are completing dot to dots:

• counting one to 40 or more
• numeral recognition
• number order
• place value 
• fine motor control
• focus and persistence
• figure ground visual perceptual skills(locating numbers on the page that are not one next to each other)
• some helping behaviors and conversations 

Even if the page is not completed accurately, there's a lot of time and attention spent looking for numbers, tracing lines, and trying to figure out the picture.

Until Next Time,
Michele