Roaring Fun and Learning: Using Dinosaurs for Counting and Basic Math Skills!

 

                                                                            

                                                                 Roaring into Math!

        The Kinder Bunnies and I enjoyed using our dinosaur collection for math. Dinosaurs are a perfect fit to spark excitement in the natural curiosity that the Bunnies possess. We showed off our number sense skills by incorporating dinosaurs into student-created math activities. 

      We started by reading several dinosaur counting books. Here are a few of our favorites that inspired us to start sorting and counting. 

                                                                                    

               They went to work sorting and counting their dinosaurs. There were great discussions about what we know about each kind of dinosaur, what they ate, and why they're extinct. It was beautiful to hear the students share why they sorted into different groups and how many were in each group. 

A few of the students decided to note their findings on Post-it notes. 

Other students decided to build a dinosaur zoo. This hands-on activity promotes number recognition and counting skills.

Another way to encourage counting is by using "dinosaur eggs." Create a set of plastic eggs with numbers. Scatter them around the room and challenge your child to find and count the eggs in order. A bonus is to have small dinosaurs inside the eggs to count and sort.

We measured our dinosaurs and created our own to use as a math counting mat. We made up our own math stories to reinforce addition and subtraction.

      Non-standard measurements using cubes and little dinosaurs kept us on task.

                               We engineered 3D shapes to capture our dinosaurs.

                          Counting dinosaur bones, and different-sized footprints, are a few other ways to bring in dinosaur counting and learning opportunities with your child. 

                                                                    Happy Learning!

                                                   

    

      

 

   

                                                       

                                             

Spring Into Math!

 

                                                               Spring Into Math!

Spring is a beautiful time of the year. With the sun shining, the birds chirping, and the flowers blooming, it is the perfect time to teach young children about the wonders of nature. It is also a great time to work on building their number sense using manipulatives.

Manipulatives are physical objects that children can touch, move, and play with. They can help children understand math concepts such as counting, addition, subtraction, and more. In this blog post, we will discuss how kindergarteners can use manipulatives during springtime to help build their number sense.

Counting flowers

One way to use manipulatives during springtime is to count flowers. You can use flower petals, plastic flowers, or even real flowers (if available) for this activity. Have the children count the number of petals on each flower and then write that number down on a piece of paper. You can also have the children group the flowers by color or type to help them practice sorting and classifying. * Note allergies and use artificial flowers if needed.

We read From The Garden: A Counting Book About Growing Food by Michael Dahl. This book inspired us to try to grow a pumpkin. 

Thanks to the rain, we have one little pumpkin so far. We'll see what happens.
 

1. Counting flowers

One way to use manipulatives during springtime is to count flowers. You can use flower petals, plastic flowers, or even real flowers (if available) for this activity. Have the children count the number of petals on each flower and then write that number down on a piece of paper. You can also have the children group the flowers by color or type to help them practice sorting and classifying.

Counting flowers

One way to use manipulatives during springtime is to count flowers. You can use flower petals, plastic flowers, or even real flowers (if available) for this activity. Have the children count the number of petals on each flower and then write that number down on a piece of paper. You can also have the children group the flowers by color or type to help them practice sorting and classifying.

Counting friendly bugs

Another fun way to spend time outside is to grab a hand lens/magnifying glass to look for ladybugs, ants, roly-pollies, worms, and more. Again, plastic bugs, bug stickers, and pictures can be used instead of actual bugs. This is a great way to practice sorting into categories and collecting data.

The Kinder Bunnies spent time on our playground looking for ladybugs in the different stages of their life cycle. We are also graphing how many days it will take for our caterpillars to become butterflies. 

We love our bug books. This book is by DK Publishing and is a big hit with my class.

Kinder Bunny entomologists looking for ladybugs.

We were surprised that it took sixteen days from when the caterpillars arrived to the first one to emerge.

Springtime is a great time to use manipulatives to help children build their number sense. These activities are fun, hands-on, and engaging for kindergarteners. By using manipulatives, children can learn math concepts memorably and enjoyably. So, grab some flowers, bugs, and raindrops, and let's get counting!

Math Is Everywhere We Look!

 

                                                              

                                                                    Happy New Year! 

                                             Math Is Everywhere We Look!                

                 Thank you for visiting our blog. We have been busy working and growing as kindergarten mathematicians. We hope the new year is off to a beautiful start for you, your family, and your students.                                                  

We have a collection of different math activities we did at the end of 2022 and a few new lessons to start in 2023. As a class, we try to find math in everything we do, from building three-dimensional shapes to sorting shapes into graphs and counting collections. We take advantage of every opportunity to count, read, and write.

                               Three-dimensional shapes are always a big hit. 

     

                  We used dice and pom-poms for gingerbread counting practice. It turned into a sorting and counting collections game too. 

Penguins and pinecones are two of our favorite things. Science, math, and reading.

                We love sorting and counting a new number collection. Do you?

       

                                                        Dice and Bones!

                                  Roll, count, and compare to your partner.

        

 

                         We created a shape museum and sorted our 3D shapes into a graph. Each Bunny shared information about their shape and why it was 3D.
                                              

                   Table families worked on 3D buildings. They wrote about their designs and counted how many blocks each structure had; this was the one with the most blocks! 

 We have enjoyed reading different books expand our learning. We hope that you love them as much as we do.

                                                         Keep on counting!

                       

We're Not Afraid of Ghosts!

                                We Love Halloween Math *

    It looks a lot like Halloween around our classroom. We finished a unit on spiders and pumpkins, and we'll learn about bats and owls over the next few weeks. We read Ten Timid Ghosts by Jennifer O'Connell to mix in some fantasy fun. We made ghost houses as part of a counting retelling, and to add a bit of fun, we learned how to draw a haunted house from Art Hub for Kids/YouTube: https://youtu.be/cGM_VhNXMmo.

      Our haunted houses became our math mats. The Bunnies had fun creating addition and subtraction stories using mini Halloween erasers as manipulatives. 

     *Please note that all of my Bunnies can celebrate Halloween. If they had observed differently, we would've created a different math mat and played other counting games during this time.

                                                   

                       Here are some of our other projects using pumpkins. We experienced pumpkin bowling during our parent involvement day and used our counting skills to determine how many blocks we knocked down. 

                      We challenged ourselves to build a stand to hold our pumpkins.

                                                  Math is everywhere! 

 

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!