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

Measuring with Non-Standard Units

We measured ourselves this week with towers of cubes. In doing so, the children learned that "length" is a measurable commodity and is measured a certain way, by placing the end of the measuring unit at a starting point. 

we practiced on a bear!

 a motivating and interesting way to practice measuring various lengths!
Until Next Time,
Michele

New Games with Numbers

This week we formalized our learning about numbers and counting.  We started the week by making pages that depicted visual representations of the numbers 6 through 10; the children created their designs in pairs, following the rule of one whole side of a square touching the other. After we created our designs, we recorded the numbers that represented the total.  

 Some children created their designs with tiles and then used paper to record their designs.

 "Racing bears" is a game that requires rolling dice to help bears to move along a game board-each time the bear reaches a star, a button is earned!

 Toss the Chips is a game that requires counting two sided tiles to add up to a total. The children write the numbers each time they add them up.

The kindergarten mathematicians were motivated to count, write numbers, add numbers, and fill in the columns of numbers. Applying our number knowledge to succeed with  purposeful but fun
games helps us to practice our math skills!

Until Next Time,
Michele