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!

  

Back to School Sorting Skills!

 

            

Welcome Back!

       I hope that your summer was restful and filled with adventures. I have a new group of Kinder Bunnies eager to share their school year with you. We've already been in school for eight days creating our school family. The Bunnies and I started sorting objects by color and size. The pictures in both Sorting and Size, by Henry Pluckrose, are excellent and lend great math conversations. 

One of our favorite books was Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister. We used Rainbow Goldfish Crackers to sort by color and used them for a math mat story. Learning how to add and subtract and eat your math is never too early.      

Our sorting work wouldn’t be complete without a Pete the Cat story. By Eric Litwin, Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons is another perfect way to learn to sort. We’ll be back soon with more learning.

                                                          

                                                                 You're Math-Tastic!

Inch by Inch!

 

                                   Worms!

What do you do when your class finds worms on the playground? In my classroom, you build worm habitats, grab the worm books off the shelf, turn worms into math, and more. 

We started by reading another classic by Leo Lionni, Inch by Inch. We made our inchworms from playdough and compared sizes with our table teams. I brought a "super worms" cup to feed our pet tarantula, Ms. Webbington. After investigating the superworms, we determined how many she needed each week. We were also surprised that our cup stated that fifty worms were inside, but after counting each one, we had sixty. Bugs, kids, and counting. Too much fun. 

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Ms. Webbington eats two super worms a week, and we learned that she needs eight worms a month to be happy. Since we had so many extra worms, we shared them with Toto, a visiting box turtle. She enjoyed her tasty treat.

                                                              Math and Nature Rock!

Counting Carrots!

 Springtime is the best time of year in kindergarten. Everything starts coming together, and the Bunnies can do so much independently. After lunch, one day, my desk was covered with the leftover carrots that no one seemed to enjoy. We quickly turned this into some math and reading fun. 

We read the classic book, The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss, and then went outside to plant carrot seeds of our own. After all, we're Kinder Bunnies, so carrots should be our favorite snack. I passed out the carrot sticks and asked the students to create different carrot combinations. Check out what we came up with. Afterward, we washed the carrots and gobbled them up.

Remember, you're a counting star!

Bugs, Bugs, Bugs!

 April 10, 2022

                             Bugs, Bugs, Bugs! We Love Bugs!

This month, the Kinder Bunnies started their entomology study by looking at various bugs. We started with bees, ants, and ladybugs. Of course, a revisit with spiders is always fun. After reading The Best Bug Parade by Holly Keller, https://youtu.be/MJvjqXeo-eo, we also investigated super worms. 

We used dice and our counting skills to create ladybug addition art. We're working on more bug projects as the month moves along. * This activity came from Whimsy Workshop Teaching. 

When students have a chance to interact with nature, they develop many skills. We counted our worms, compared their sizes, and noticed their speed and what they liked to eat. They also learned how to care for other living things. Their conversations were filled with new vocabulary words, and they formed honest opinions based on first-hand experiences. 

Picture by S. Thomas.

We'll be back with more bug fun soon. 

Happy Counting!

Hopping into Spring!

 March 21, 2022. 

                                Hopping into Spring!

The Kinder Bunnies have been very busy investigating rocks, soil, and the moon over the past few weeks. The stars, dirt, rocks, and space are always a big hit with little ones. There are great phone apps to help bring the stars right to their hands. One of my favorites is StarTracker. (Tracker https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.PYOPYO.StarTracker&hl=en_US&gl=US).  

        

            We started by collecting rocks and then counting them. A rock collection is easy to start and build on wherever you go. The Bunnies sorted their rocks by size, color, and shape. Next, we used our measuring tools to learn how to compare the different weights. Our work would only be complete with reading all about rocks. A book that we enjoyed was Let's Go Rock Collecting by Roma Gans. Another fantastic book that the Bunnies connected with was Rhonda's Rock Hunt by Molly Beth Griffen(https://youtu.be/6l1NXnkdE8E ).

       Learning about rocks made us wonder more about the sun. We experimented with sun prints and engineered shade structures to see if we could protect our "photo-sensitive" bead pet from getting sunburned. (https://www.stevespanglerscience.com/store/uv-color-changing-beads.html).