The Crazy Pre-K Classroom

In Pre-K and Kinder working with numbers is just as important as word work. We spend alot of time talking about manipulating letters for reading but not much time talking about manipulating numbers. Sure counting forwards and backwards is important but if you cannot identify what number comes before or after then there is a problem. Leaving holes like this in the learning of numbers and math strategies can cause frustration for children later in their education. Count and color is an excellent way to help children understand one to one correspondence and how to stop counting at a certain number. I have often found in my classroom that when you ask a child to count objects they either skip, go to fast or cannot stop till they get to 10. These habits all need to be worked on before they become a permannent way for the child to work with numbers. This also brings in the importance of 10 frames, having a child place one object in each box allows them to decifer between each box and the obj...

Hello All, This past week was so much fun. Between creating snowmen, playing in fake snow and having a cotton ball snowball fight we had a great time. One of my favorite activities was a non-standard measurement activity, measuring ourselves against numbered snowballs. I started by taping 30 numbered snowballs from bottom to top on my cabinet and then I hung a graph with each child's name and the numbers 1-30 with the title "How many snowballs tall are you?" Before starting the activity we counted the snowballs and I had each student estimate how many snowballs tall they would be, I also had them guess for me. I was surprised at how many estimations were close or correct. I recorded their estimations on the dry erase board and we then stood by the snowballs one at a time. We recorded our height on the bar graph. We talked about who was the tallest and who was the shortest, which children were close to the same height etc. After everyone had a chance to be measured...