A Garden of Numbers

Number sense can be a tricky thing to teach. Identifying numbers and being able to count with one to one correspondence in Kindergarten varies so much with each child. It's one of those areas that you can have two children who are the same age and at the same level on one area but are at completely different ends of the spectrum in this.

We're nearing the end of the school year and that means assessing how far our kids have come with their number sense.

I decided to make a spring game; flower pots with dots on them (numbered 1-30) and flowers with numerals on them (1-30).

The idea was to choose a flower pot, count the dots and match it to the flower with the corresponding numeral.

 You get the idea.

This was a fantastic activity for all of the kids, at all levels of understanding because the children who were better with their one to one correspondence and counting past 10 were challenged to choose pots with many dots while the children were are still developing their number sense skills were encouraged to choose pots with less than 10 dots. And because the children glued their pots onto construction paper I was easily able to write my assessments right on the back of their papers.

Our math board is beautifully decorated now with a garden of numbers.

Opposites

My class has been working with opposites for the past week.

It's funny how concepts that seem so simple to us are so much more difficult for them. And trying to explain the meaning of the word opposites without using the word...

"What is an opposite? Well, it's the opposite."

Um, yeah, that's not going to work.

So to facilitate this we brought out the opposites pack. Anchor charts, right the room, matching games, and create your own opposites books.

The children had a blast with the set and the concept was more easily understood with the hands on activities.

You can download the opposites set at my TpT store and my TN shop

Red Wigglers the Cadillac of Worms...tee hee

I'm probably dating myself with the title of the post.  Anyone who was old enough to have watched WKRP in Cincinnati will get it.

Anyhow...a few months ago I bought a table top compost bin from Scholastic. It's pretty nifty, it has three different compartments so that you can compare the rate of decomposition of different items.

When we read the story The Day Mother Earth Got Sick and the children talked more about it we decided it would be a good idea to see for ourselves what happens to garbage we through on the ground.

Isn't it wonderful when the children take themselves down the very path you hope they will. The whole reason I bought the compost was in preparation for reading that book in hopes the kids would naturally find their way down this road.

We did some brainstorming and decided to put food in one compartment, paper in another and plasticine in another. We buried them in the soil and documented day one.

A few days later we were lucky enough to be given some composting worms (red wigglers...the Cadillac of worms!)  so we put them into the compartment with food. The children insisted the worms not be put into the compartment with paper or playdough since those items were trash and would make our little wormies sick.  I think the story really made an impact on them. 

 We've been documenting the changes every few days. We now have mold. Yuck! But it's also a good sign that things are decomposing. The children are excited by the changes they are seeing.  I just hope the worms are eating it!

Earth Day Activities

Earth Day is approaching next week, the perfect time to revisit how we can help keep our Earth clean and protect our natural resources for future generations.

Kids don't really think that far ahead, they are focused on the here and now.

We use a couple of great resources at this time of year with our class. One of my favorites is this book. Seriously, in my opinion this book is the single best story teaching children about the damage pollution is doing to the earth and the illustrations are amazing.

Click here to get more information and to purchase this amazing story.

 

 





 It leads us into some very rich conversation about how we can make our smaller environment (our homes and schools) cleaner.

That usually results in conversation about littering. We all don rubber gloves and head outside and pick up trash in the school yard. 

That leads us to talks about garbage, the three R's - reuse, reduce and recycle.

In our classroom we have a grey bin for recycling paper, a blue bin for recycling plastic bottles and aluminum cans and a garbage can (sadly we don't have a green bin for organic waste however all the children do at home so we talk about that too)

One of the skills we work on at the beginning of the year is learning what goes into what bin. It's great for the data management strand in math but it also helps eliminate sandwich crusts in the blue bin and juice boxes in the garbage. We co create anchor charts to post near the garbage corner and we do a lot of reminding. The good news is that by October our kids are pretty good and knowing what items from their lunch bags go into what bins.

When earth day rolls around we revisit this activity only this time it's a table top sorting game. And while I'm all for kids getting their hands dirty, I'm not too keen on them picking through the trash so I created a cleaner version of the garbage/recycling sorting game.

You can get it at my TpT store or my TN store....absolutely free!

Happy trash sorting!

Lent

We are entering the 4th week of Lent so I thought I'd share a bit of what happens in our class during this time of year.

I love Lent. Not just because it's the leads up the most important event in our Church calendar but because it's a wonderful time of year for reaffirming what it means to be a good Christian, or more simply a good person. The children really shine at this time of year eager to share with their friends all of the effort they make at doing good for others.

Our prayer table at Lent is usually quite full, this can be a challenge because the actual table is quite small.

This is how we set it up for the first week. Eventually our basket of bible stories will have to move to make was for everything else that's added. But in the meantime....

The heart represents God's heart. Our goal as a class is to fill it with love and we do this by doing good deeds for other (much like filling someone's bucket) The children are all sent home with a page of hearts and a note explaining to their parents that we are filling God's heart with love. When a child does a good deed at home their parent can write it on a heart and send it back to school. That child then gets to share with the class what he or she did and then places the heart inside the big felt one.

We also have a basket of hearts on the table for us to give to the children when we 'catch them' being kind and for them to give to one another should someone do something kinds for them. This is especially great for writing because the kids are encouraged to write on the hearts they give to their friends and because so many of them are eager to give hearts - a lot of writing happens!

By the time Easter rolls around that felt heart is usually overflowing.

Beside the hearts you can see colourful jars. Those are our jelly beans. During Lent we say the Jelly Bean Lent prayer along with our school prayer in the morning. Each jar has a different coloured jelly
bean in it with corresponding verse on the label. The children especially enjoy sharing these jelly beans during our "Alleluia" party after Easter.

Below is a copy of the Jelly Bean Lent prayer. I'd love to give credit to the person who wrote it but I've never been able to find out who did. If you know, feel free to comment and let me know so I can give credit where credit is due.

 

 

What you don't see in the picture is the small jars of oil and water, and a candle that we add throughout the weeks of Lent. Each week as we add these items we sing a verse from a song "Take A Walk to Easter"  It's a great rewrite of "Take A Walk to Christmas" from the In God's Image CD. Each verse corresponds with a week of Lent so that by Holy Thursday we are singing the whole song.

 

After Easter weekend, we keep these things on our prayer table to for the entire 50 days of Easter. However, we also add to it a banner that says Alleluia (that the children make!) and a plant.

 

All in all this is most definitely one of my favorite centres in the class.

 



Spring is here!!

 

 

This may well have been the longest winter in the history of the world. I'm so glad spring is finally here and with it, hopefully, some nicer weather. I'm looking forward to being able to get outside more consistently.

 

Spring means new life. It also means we'll be getting our chicken eggs soon for our chick hatching. Last year was the first time we did it and it was so much fun. The learning that took place was phenomenal and I don't expect any less this year.

 

One way we challenged the children to think was that we didn't tell them what kind of animal was in the egg. This meant the children had to research animals that come from eggs and draw their own conclusions as to what animal they thought was inside them. Some of the answers we got were amazing. My favorite was one of the boys who insisted it had to be turtles because he saw turtle eggs in a book that had spots on it and some of our eggs had spots too. I loved the connection.

 

One thing we used to document the learning that took place, besides a million pictures, was the Egg Journal.

 

 

Each child had their own egg journal in which the could document the entire process with words and pictures. Even our reluctant writers were anxious to participate.

 

The egg journal is available in my TpT store as well as my TN store.

 

And because it is just to awesome to not share. Our class was lucky enough to be able to see several of the eggs hatch. This was the first one they saw. You can hear the genuine awe in the children's voices and I so loved spontaneous applause at the end.

 

 

 



Welcome Back!

I took a small hiatus from my blog, so much going on in other aspects of life that unfortunately this  fell by the wayside.

But I'm back, and better than ever, ready to share my ideas, resources and adventures in Full Day Kindergarten.

Let the wild ride begin!