So, I'm already gone from my sweet class to student teach but I had this post hanging around about some of the great math we were doing in Pre-K over the past few months that I wanted to share!
One of our favorite things to do in Pre-K is math workshop. The peas love it SO much in fact that during our free centers, often I see things like this happening:
Which means they are doing math for fun and that is the most fantastic thing ever. #winning ;)
It all started with ten frame math! We learned about ten frames at the beginning of the year and we have been learning many ways to make ten so that we can develop a sense of "ten-ness" as we develop number sense. Understanding how ten is made and how it fits into other numbers will really help the peas in their future math endeavors. Here are a few pictures of one of our ten frame math workshops below!
During math workshop the peas all have a "turn and talk" partner to discuss ideas with. They work together during the workshop. In this activity, they decided how many dots each partner needed to make to fill up the ten frame. After they finished, the partners came to the front and "read" their ten frame to the class!
We are also learning to compose numbers! We used our journals to compose numbers using red and yellow counters. The peas could choose any amount of counters ten or under and then they got to shake, shake, shake them in a cup and spill them out. They drew a picture representation of what their chips were and wrote a math sentence. They did fantastic!
One of our favorite ways to bring math to our classroom is by using something that really interests the peas....matchbox cars!
Every week I buy a handful of cars and we add them to the car box. We have been adding them since the beginning of the year. I did this last year, too, so we had a good number to start with, but I noticed last year that it was such a good way to make big numbers relevant to the kiddos. Every time I would bring the new cars in on Mondays, they would line up ALL the cars to count them. Gradually the whole class began looking forward to this every Monday morning. They would count them, add the cars to the tub and write a new number.
We would also spend time sorting them by make, model, type, color, etc. As you can imagine, I began to get many specific requests. ;) As we got closer in our number circle to 100 (we sit in a circle and count sequentially as high as we can go!) we got closer to 100 in our car tub until....drum roll please.....
I PRESENT TO YOU....100 MATCHBOX CARS!
Well, that is just a little peek into math in Pre-K. I already miss your sweet faces every day. Keep counting mathematicians! Hugs!
