Teddy Bear Picnic Graph

                                                                        

                                              Teddy Bear Picnic

    To end our bear unit, we celebrated with a teddy bear picnic. The Bunnies decided that we needed to graph all of the "quiet friends," aka stuffed animals, who attended our picnic. One of our favorite authors is Karma Wilson, so we had to read her book Bear Counts, and it was a big hit. 

                                                

                                     

     Graphing has become one of our standard math routines. We're mathematicians and scientists, so we love our data collection. We love talking about our data even more because we get to share what we've learned and what others think. We started on the first day of school with our names and progressed to graphing our "quiet friends" at our picnic. We take clipboards out to the playground during recess to collect information from other classrooms. We started to compare our results with others. *A future post will reveal more! 

          They learned that we had more "wild animals" and bears at our picnic than any other creature. We were surprised that we had an equal amount of "fantasy friends" and Sonic characters. They were making comparisons and debating how to name each group. It was fun listening to them decide how to organize their quiet friends. 

         To end our day, we used bear counters, dice, and caves to have bear-counting fun. 

                                                                     

                                                Roll the dice and add bears to the cave.

                                         There was sorting by color, shape, and size too. 

                                              We "bearly" had enough time to finish!

      

                                                                     

                                                        

                                                                     

All The Leaves Are Falling Down!

                                                                   Happy Fall

       It's over a hundred degrees outside in Southern California, but we're still celebrating the Fall season with a great new book and several counting activities. How does your class celebrate this particular time of the year? 

        We've settled nicely into our new daily routines and are ready to share what we've been up to for the past several weeks. We read the book, Counting On Fall by 

Lizann Flatt used that as our starting point for looking to nature for math. This beautifully illustrated book has several different Fall habitats with animals and other objects to notice and wonder about. This book stimulated many conversations and led us to go on our own Fall counting walk. 

         The Bunnies were excited to use leaves for counting and graphing activities. We sorted them by color, shape, and size and graphing by color. We also used our Fall tree artwork for a math mat. One Bunny suggested putting numbers on the leaves to help put them in a number line. 

      The book, The Leaves Are Falling One by One, by Steve Metzger, is always a big hit. We had fun throwing our six hundred pretend leaves around as we read the book.     

               

                                                        Leaf Math Mats

                                                         A Leaf Graph

                                                        Leaf Numbers 

        I have future math teachers in this group of Bunnies. They love creating new math activities on their own. 

                                                  Math is for Everyone!