Collecting Data

The first question that we ask is "What is data?" and then we realize that it's information. A collection of information. We drew pictures of our lunches and chose our favorite item, and then worked to group the favorites coherently so that we could compare them. Our next collection of information involved asking Yes/No survey questions to each other and then throughout the school. The children made predictions, as in "I'm going to ask a question that everyone is going to say yes to!" (and yes, they did-she asked "Do you like friends?")   We used either tally marks or writing out names to collect our information, according to how many people we might ask. When all of the data was collected, we counted up yes and no and compared them, and added the numbers to get a total of people asked.

This work is very exciting and motivating to the kindergartners! One child even used a strategy for counting up his big numbers-marking each tally as he counted. I'm very proud of these kindergarten mathematical thinkers!

Until Next Time,
Michele

poised thinkers.....

Attributes and Self-Portraits

To begin the week, we practiced counting by sets of two by counting how many eyes were in our group. The children drew their eyes and we made a few charts together. We moved on to sorting sets of objects by creating self portraits and playing a game "What's my rule?" wherein we sorted ourselves by rules that we made up, or attributes.

 Our self portraits! Can you guess who is who?

Until Next Time,
Michele

And The Doorbell Rang!

The kindergarten mathematicians read The Doorbell Rang by Pat Hutchins and we practiced and performed for the first graders as well as the PreK children. The children really seemed to enjoy figuring out how to show each aspect of the story, and everyone chanted "And the Doorbell Rang" at the appropriate time to move the story along. Some of the comments that we received included "I liked how you divided the cookies!" and "I liked the doorbell". 

 There were exactly enough children to have a dozen cookies to share AND a ma.

Until Next Time,
Michele

our audience-they loved our story!

Drama in Math!

Not that kind of drama! We wrote story problems this week and acted them out. The catalyst for our work was the story The Doorbell Rang which involves a limited amount of cookies and an increasing amount of children to share them with. The children drew pictures and wrote number sentences for their stories, and we helped by writing out the words. The problems that the children produced were very thoughtful.  They each took a turn being the "director" and choosing actors and telling their stories. This activity reinforces the idea of combining and taking away, as well as number notation and solving word problems. AND it's very motivating to create and act out a story!

"There were five kitties. Two kitties left."

"Two people were watching television."

"There were two stars and four hearts."

"There were four butterflies. Two cats came along."

"The good guy called for back-up."

Until Next Time,
Michele

Celebrating 100!

We celebrated 100 days of school by creating a string of 100 buttons (first we needed to decide how many children would need to make strings of 10 buttons to then join together, so there was some counting by 10's to 100). We filled in grids of numbers to 100, and filled in pegboards to make 100. We are all at different levels of number recording ability, but together we can certainly make 100!

Until Next Time,
Michele