We do many hands-on activities in math. We work with both individual and group calendars every day. We work on our number line, counting the days of school and even keep track of them in a pocket chart to learn about place value. We keep a tally of the number of days of school in each month and learn about counting by 5's. We graph the weather every day and use graphing frequently to display information. Math in Kindergarten is fun!

We begin the year by exploring some of our math manipulatives. These may include unifix cubes, pattern blocks, cuisenaire rods, keys, buttons, shells, geoboards, etc. It is important to learn some of the properties of these objects and get to play with them and learn their names, before they are used for more teacher directed activities.

Our first major unit in math is patterning. We find patterns all over our room. They are on the number line, on our calendar, on the borders of our bulletin boards, even on our clothing! We make patterns with our voices, with our bodies and with attributes like hair color and eye color, or stripes on your clothes, etc.. We make our own pattern books after using the various manipulatives. This is a month long project. Some of our pages are pictured below. The favorite project was the secret door pattern. The fences with patterns all get a black door, to hide one of the pieces of the pattern and the children take turns trying to guess what is covered. This gets put together as a book for all to enjoy.

These are some pages from our patterning books.

These are our Secret Door Patterns. Come see them in our class book

and guess what is covered up!

These grids were all made with the same pattern,

but they look different when you put them in different size grids!

Our new unit is on counting. Most children know how to count by rote up to 20 or even to 100 or higher. Some of the things we will be working on are: counting using 1:1 correspondence, counting backwards, counting by 2's, 5's and 10's and learning to count on. Check back to see what we are doing!

This week we worked on estimating and counting 1:1. We used lots of jars of math manipulatives and first estimated how many objects were in the jar and then counted them. We had some great estimators. On Wednesday and Thursday we worked on counting using unifix cubes. We played a game called spinner towers, spinning the wheel to get cubes to build towers and then spinning again to be able to remove them each one from our game board. We had fun and worked hard at automatically identifying the numbers and counting with good 1:1 correspondence.

We have finished up our unit on counting with lots of games and a counting book to practice our handwriting. We have taught the children how to form each of the numbers correctly now, but you will see reversals all year long. Please do not worry about this! Almost all five and six year old children reverse some or even all of their numbers as they first begin to learn to write them. They just need lots of exposure to these new abstract symbols. We do point out the correct way to make them when we see mistakes now, but it too will pass. We are much more concerned about number sense and mathematical concepts, like patterning, sorting and classifying, etc., at this age than whether or not a 2 is backwards.

Now we are working on a short "foot " unit. We are measuring our feet, counting- yet again- the number of unifix cubes to make the perimeter, length, width and area of our feet and will be graphing information about your family's feet ( if you did your homework) next week. Bare feet are lots of fun- and we get to do math too! Measuring objects at home with non-standard measuring tools- just about anything will do, is a lot of fun. We're sure you will come up with many new ways to measure. Five and six year olds don't need to learn to measure using real rulers and the inch/foot/yard or metric system. Have fun with string, pasta, index fingers, etc.!

We graphed all of our homework and counted by 2s and 5s and 10s! We also made graphs of whether or not our feet were ticklish and whether or not we liked to walk barefoot. The pictures are of the graph in progress- only one group had finished at the time. We also did lots of math jobs in December!

Our last math projects of December were yummy! We did some gingerbread math and ate up all our work. First we made a gingerbread glyph.  Glyph is short for hieroglyphic- another way to show information. We colored our gingerbread men according to a special code. Each one was different. Then we each took only one bite of our gingerbread man and graphed which part got bitten off first. It was a lot of fun and tasty too.

We have been working on sorting and classifying in January. We have sorted people: by hair color, eye color, length of hair and many different attributes of their clothing: dresses, shoes, stripes, turtlenecks, etc. We moved on to sorting materials and sorted unifix cubes, wooden cubes, pattern blocks, shells, and nuts 'n bolts, among others. We played the Mystery Box game and learned how to choose attributes for our questions that would be helpful in determining what was hidden in the box. We started sorting by 2 attributes into Venn diagrams. This is a difficult concept to grasp in Kindergarten, but the children did very well. We learned that to get anything in the middle we couldn't sort objects by 2 colors, i.e. red and blue or 2 shapes, but had to choose to sort by very different attributes, like color and shape. Our last project was to sort colored pasta by 2 attributes using Venn diagrams. This was a lot of fun and many children were able to do this independently.