Spooky Fun with Math Mats!

                                                  Spooky Fun with Math Mats! 🎃

        October is the perfect time to bring spooky fun into your child's

early math learning. Using themed math mats like bats, spiders,

or even a haunted house can turn counting and simple math stories

into an exciting activity. Whether your child is counting bat wings or

sorting spiders into groups, these activities help them build number

sense by understanding how numbers work together in groups.

Counting with natural objects gives children a concrete way to see

and feel numbers, making math more meaningful and fun.

    The TK Bunnies used their spooky houses to explore their

Halloween counters. We also made bat and spider math mats for extra fun.

    

        A trip to a pumpkin patch lends itself to more counting fun. 

We took advantage of the groups of pumpkins we found to

practice our counting skills. We arranged pumpkins into groups, 

so we made a pumpkin counting book. 

        Are you looking for a fun story to pair with your counting activities?

"Five Little Pumpkins" is a classic rhyme that introduces counting

in a playful way, perfect for little learners. We enjoy this one.

Five Little Pumpkins

Five little pumpkins sitting on a gate,
The first one said, "Oh my, it's getting late!"
The second one said, "There are witches in the air."
The third one said, "But we don't care!"
The fourth one said, "Let's run and run and run."
The fifth one said, "I'm ready for some fun!"
Then, whooo went the wind,
And out went the lights,
And the five little pumpkins rolled out of sight. (Author unknown)

                           Here is one of our favorite pumpkin books by Joan Holub.

 

                                                        Happy Halloween Counting!

Building Number Sense Through Play in TK and Kindergarten

 

                            Building Number Sense Through Play in TK and Kindergarten

The beginning of the year in TK and Kindergarten is exciting as we explore the world. One crucial skill we focus on is developing our number sense. To make learning fun and engaging, we use play-based activities to help us understand numbers and their relationships.

One of our favorite activities is sorting and counting different animal collections. We gather various animal toys or pictures and sort them into categories, such as farm animals, wild animals, or sea creatures. As we sort, we count the animals in each group, practicing our counting skills and learning to recognize patterns.

Here are a few pictures of our counting collections.

I recommend exploring counting and sorting books to continue building our number sense at home. These books can introduce different counting concepts, such as one-to-one correspondence, counting forwards and backward, and recognizing numbers. They can also include fun activities, like matching numbers to pictures or counting objects in a scene.

Bear Counts by Karma Wilson and Jane Chapman is one of our favorite books at the beginning of the year.

One of our new favorites is by author Temperace Meadow South.

By incorporating play into our learning, we can make math more enjoyable and accessible. Remember, the goal is to have fun and build a strong foundation for future learning.

                                                                    Happy counting!

"Shape Up!" It's All About 2D and 3D Shapes

 

                                              Shape Up! It's All About 2D and 3D Shapes!

       As a kindergarten teacher, I know teaching young children about shapes is essential to their early education. Understanding the properties of two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) shapes lays the foundation for more advanced math concepts later on.

                                                                 Pattern Block Work

                                                                        

    First, let's talk about 2D shapes. These are flat shapes that have only two dimensions: length and width. Some examples of 2D shapes you can introduce to your kindergarten students include circles, squares, triangles, rectangles, and rhombuses. You can ask your students to identify these shapes in their environment, such as in books, buildings, and objects around them. The Kinder Bunnies had fun finding these shapes around our classroom. 

            We discovered that our classroom has many cylinders compared to other shapes. 

                                       By: Charles Ghinga and Illustrated by AG Jatkowska

                                              What shapes can you find in your lunch today?

                                                  

                                                    One of our projects with a box!

    Moving on to 3D shapes, these have three dimensions: length, width, and depth. These shapes have volume and take up space. Some examples of 3D shapes you can teach your kindergarten students include spheres, cubes, pyramids, cones, and cylinders. You can use everyday objects like balls, blocks, and cans to help your students understand these shapes better. After reading Boxitects, we built 3D zoo homes for our tigers. 

                                                                      A box fire truck.

 

    The Kinder Bunnies loved using games, puzzles, and hands-on activities to make learning about shapes engaging. You can also encourage your students to create shapes using play dough or sticks. 

                                We ended our shape unit with a "shape dance." Give it a try. 
                                                                                                          

                                                                   

                                                                           Shape Up!

     

Marching into Math

 

                         Rainbows, Leprechauns, and Gold!

            March is off to a great start with rainbow and unicorn counting collections. We used

our tiny erasers from Target to get the month off to a fun start. Every Friday, we work with our different counting collections. A counting collection can be anything you want it to be. A collection of buttons, Legos, blocks, tiny erasers, socks, rocks, and the list goes on and on. Anything you find in a collection can be a collection to count and sort. We read Dr. Seuss's book 123 to kick off his birthday and our counting work. 

                                                                             

                                                                               

            We use five, ten, and twenty frames to help us build our number sense. I created patterns, compared groups, and solved addition and subtraction problems. What kind of collection would you make?       

                                     

        The Bunnies enjoyed playing a pot of gold dice game, counting and comparing coin groups, and more. 

                                                               

                                                                       
                                                                              Keep on counting!

                 

February is Filled with Counting

 

                        February is for Counting and Creating

                The Kinder Bunnies were very busy this month with the Lunar New Year, Valentine's Day, Presidents' Day, and Leap Year. These special days offered us time to read, count, and create. 

                We created dragons for the Lunar New Year. We continued our non-standard measurement practice by using coins to measure our creations; we learned that some of us were born in the year of the Rooster and others in the year of the Dog. Thanks to one of our parents, we learned how to write numbers from one to ten in Chinese and how to count out loud. Grab a copy of Happy Chinese New Year! By Jannie Ho and enjoy a new book in your library.

                         

                       

                The Bunnies celebrated Valentine's Day by reading The Day It Rained Hearts. We created our own umbrellas and used hearts to create different math stories. We also used hearts for matching numbers, counting and sorting, patterns, and more. 

                Even though money isn't a standard in kindergarten, we couldn't resist using pennies to count and learn about President Lincoln. We also read a sweet story called A Penny In My Pocket by CM Harris. We learned that a kind gift can go a long way. 

               

                                       Counting is all around you. What will you count today?

Wonderful Winter Math

 

                           Winter Counting

         The rainy weather in Southern California has brought snow to our mountains, which means it's a bit colder than the Bunnies are used to. We're embracing the winter snap with some fun new stories and, of course, math practice.

       We love Arctic animals, so we couldn't wait to read the book Sizing Up Winter by Lizann Flatt. Kindergartners love the opportunity to measure different animals. We made polar bears and penguins to test our non-standard measurements. 

                           
                                   

Over in the Arctic by Marianne Berkes was another big hit. Counting polar baby animals is always a big hit. 

The rich vocabulary in Ten Animals in Antarctica by Moria Court helped us with our writing. 

It wouldn't be winter without reading Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. 

We wished that our snowballs were real, but we still had fun creating different number combinations.

We also went on a winter nature walk and counted birds, trees, sticks, and rocks. What would you count on a winter walk? 

Remember that you are always math-mazing! 

Counting Through the Holidays: A Kindergarten Adventure

                                                      Happy Holidays!    

    The holiday season offers a magical opportunity for kindergarteners to learn counting festively. Integrating learning into holiday-themed activities is how the Kinder Bunnies add a little extra fun to their day. We have two of our favorite holiday books perfect for this time of the year.

                                                 

       We drew our own sleds for this math activity and read a book called "Ten on the Sled" by Kim Norman. The Kinder Bunnies loved the animals on the sled, teaching them to count backward in a fun winter setting. We used this story to graph the story characters, along with using our sled drawings as a math mat. 

    Instead of animals on our sleds, we used clipart pictures of toys, gifts, and candy to make up our addition and subtraction stories.  

    We created glitter snowflake art and used pom-poms to continue our addition and subtraction stories with "Ten Sparkly Snowflakes by Tiger Tales. The Kinder Bunnies loved using glitter glue to make their math mats pop. We'll save them and use them again after the new year for more winter fun. They also liked counting backward again with forest animals. We compared and contrasted the two stories during our reading block. 

* This year, all of the Kinder Bunnies are celebrating Christmas.

The use of trees and sleds was parent-approved.

    One of our families donated a math activity that helped us practice counting and decorating. The felt trees were used with dice, one or more depending on "the challenge." Each Bunny would roll and decorate their tree, snowman, or gingerbread man with holiday decorations.* The smaller trees used beads for decorations. 

    We liked the activity so much that we created our own trees and then graphed the stickers on each tree. We knew there had to be a book to support our tree theme, and we found 1"0 Trim-the-Tree'ers" by Janet Schulman.   

    Counting can be part of many holiday activities, from baking and decorating to making art. These activities help reinforce number skills enjoyably. 

                                        Counting the Joys of the Season!