This was such a fun week at school.
We wrapped up St. Patrick’s Day.
We started talking about pets.
We also covered the letter Xx.
I am loving the variation of skills my students are able to practice.
We introduced subtraction using manipulative.
I insist on practicing BOTH addition and subtraction skills.
Why?
After teaching kinders for ten years and doing these skills over and over again,
I discovered that when I teach subtraction,
I should STILL have my students practicing addition and subtraction,
This helps my students to not “lose” the idea of addition.
Plus they work constantly on both skills.
They are able to connect the two concepts.
Do they confuse which concept they are suppose to be doing?
Yep.
But I am getting them to pay attention to the math symbols NOW
and continue to focus on it.
Let’s face it.
Whenever you mix addition and subtraction, they confuse the two then as well.
It is gonna happen to I chose to head off the issue from the beginning.
Any who…
Let’s get on to some fun, engaging math centers.
Yellow table–
this station was a typical tens and one station we use often.
Since we covered the letter Xx this week, which is part of this bundle. We used this box themed sheet.
My students read the number and fill in the ten frame to make that number.
Since we do this often, my students are really getting good at this.
They are getting fast.
And they are learning about ways to make the numbers instead of just counting the number of boxes.
This friend was counting by rows of 5’s to make her numbers.
Another friend WRITES her numbers into each box.
Why?
Because she is a hard worker and she likes to write numbers in all the crayons because it is pretty.
Who am I to complain!?
Orange table– https://sharingkindergarten.com/product/pets/
Our theme this week was all about pets
so we had to find these cute doggies their addition sum homes.
Red table–
This was fun. The goal of this station was to get my students to MATCH bone pieces.
On one side was the equation and the number picture.
The other side has the solution.
As I love to do,
I made 4 sets of these with different colored bones for each student.
My students liked this station because they didn’t have to write anything.
And I liked this station because I like to show my students multiple ways to solve math problems.
Purple table–
This table was a writing to 100 card.
One side of this page protector had a sheet with numbers 1-50
and on the flip side was numbers 51-100.
Breaking it down into two parts helped my students to not get overwhelmed.
We still don’t write all our numbers correctly.
We still flip numbers.
But man are we working hard.
We are making progress.
Blue table–
This table was hard.
It was larger addition problems to practice,
using pet themed notepads.
Why was this station hard?
No counters and the numbers went higher than their ten fingers.
This is my secret trick to get students to put the BIG number in their head and add on.
{Why do you automatically hold up 5 fingers without counting them,
then you count them again to find the solution to 5+2? It makes no sense!}
Here was some frog addition problems.
You can see how this student put eight in their head,
then added 7 dots to the bottom.
They started counting at 8 then counted on using the 7 dots.
These cats were at the same table, but just for another student.
This student needed to circle the bigger number,
then add dots for the smaller number to find the solution.
And check out the fish.
This student did the same addition strategy.
But he started understanding that sense 11 is made with one set of ten and a one,
then 10+1 is 11.
He didn’t need to use counters.
Our last math center was at the green table–
We used these pots of gold to work on subtraction problems.
These pots gave them their initial amount,
then each student needed to take away the amount to find the solution.
I hope these ideas and activities help inspire engaging math activities in your classroom.
If you want links, I included many of them in this post.
These are the products I used this week.
Kindergarten is such a fun year for writing and reading progress. I wish I would have saved more samples from my years of teaching over the years as each kid has such a unique style!
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