It's Looking Like Fall!

 

                                                            September Fall Counting Fun

    The Kinder Bunnies started the month of September with counting and engineering with fall things. We enjoyed reading Count Down to Fall by Fran Hawk. This book allowed us to practice counting backward from ten while learning new vocabulary words such as maple, birch, aspen, oak, pine, and more. It inspired us to create our own leaf collections.

                                                           

                                       We counted, sorted, and graphed our leaves.                              
  

    The beginning of fall would be fun without trying to engineer 2D and 3D shapes with pieces of apples. The Bunnies were very creative this year. 

                                                                Posted with Parent's Permission

Vincent * engineered an apple person, and Leila was the first Bunny to get measured with apples. 

                                                                    * Posted with Parent's Permission

        We rounded up the month by counting bears and graphing our annual bear picnic.

                                                 

Fall is a great time to practice our counting skills. Start with a nature walk and collect leaves, sticks, or rocks. Graph the fall fruit in your kitchen. How many pumpkins do you see around the neighborhood on your walks? 

Count On!

Kick-Start Kindergarten: Counting and Sorting with School Supplies

 

Happy New School Year!

        It's August, so it's time to meet my new group of Kinder Bunnies. The Kinder Bunnies arrive with bright eyes, eager minds, and school supplies! Most of us remember the excitement of getting new crayons, pencils, and notebooks. But did you know these everyday items offer learning opportunities, especially in mathematics? 

         We have been working on sorting school supplies by color, shape, and size, along with counting. Let’s dive into how to utilize school supplies for counting and sorting activities, setting the foundation for your kindergartener’s math journey.

  Crayon Color Counting

Supplies: A box of crayons 24 or more.

Activity:

- Spread the crayons out and have your child sort them by color.

- Once sorted, ask them to count how many crayons are in each group.

- Extension: Introduce simple addition by combining groups. For example, "How many crayons do we have if we combine the red and blue ones?"

-Ask classmates or family members what their favorite color is to create a graph. 

                                    Pencil Length Comparison

Supplies Needed: Different-sized pencils, cubes, or any object to help with non-standard measurement.

Activity:

- Line up the pencils from shortest to longest.

- Ask questions such as "Which pencil is the shortest? Which is the longest?"

- Extension: Use cubes or other objects to measure each pencil.

                                Button Size and Shape Sort

Supplies Needed: Various buttons (from home or craft stores)

Activity:

- Spread the buttons and have your kindergartener sort them by size or shape.

- Count how many buttons are in each group.

- Discuss the different attributes of each button: size, number of holes, color, etc. * Not recommended for children four years old. Watch carefully.

              Remember to read Pete the Cat's Four Groovy Buttons.

                               

Sticker Patterns

Supplies Needed: A packet of stickers

Activity:

- Create patterns using the stickers, like circle-star-circle or blue-red-blue-red.

- Ask your child to extend the pattern.

- Count how many of each sticker type are in the pattern.

Wrap-up!

       Using school supplies for counting and sorting integrates learning into a fun, hands-on activity and familiarizes young students with the tools they’ll be using throughout the year. It's a win-win!

      The beginning of the school year is essential for setting the foundation for future learning. Turning something as simple as school supplies into a learning tool teaches your kindergarteners that learning opportunities are everywhere!

                               Happy counting and sorting!

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!