The Crazy Pre-K Classroom

Hello All! I truly hope you are enjoying your winter. I know many of you have had several snow days, here in Texas we have had 2 ice days, which is unheard of down here! This week my class started working intentionally on addition and subtraction concepts. While I always try to connect simple addition and subtraction concepts to my numbers lesson it is very informal. I am now planning the majority of my number lesson on addition and subtraction concepts.I know my class is ready to begin these concepts when they can count to 50 forwards and backwards, can pattern easily, can put numbers to 20 in order and can easily sort by color. With all of this in place teaching the basic addition and subtraction strategies should be easy! (Well, we will see!) So, we started this week with 10 frames,you can easily make your own or print out free sets through a google search. Each child then has 10 objects to use to count. I start with addition problems to 5. I instruct the children to "place 1 c...

Hello All, I just wanted to share some ideas for teaching addition to the four year olds we all love. I like to start out by using manipulatives for the children to count. Today I used paper hearts because the paper we were working on was left from Valentine's day. As we read through the story problem I had the children circle each number. They then identified the number for me. We counted enough hearts to represent each of the numbers and then counted them all together. Seems simple right? But in the brains of 4 year olds putting two groups together is not always that easy. First,there can be a color divide, getting them to continue past the first color set fluently into the next color set is a challenge. Second, they are used to rote counting without manipulatives in front of them. So to get around these problems I broke my groups up into small groups and placed their papers on a clipboard. We worked together on the rug to get through 2 word problems. After circling the numbe...

Clothespins come in handy at home for this or that but in my classroom they mean serious business. This week I am using my new clothespin center to reinforce color recognition, color words, counting and addition/subtraction concepts. First I printed and laminated the color word cards on cardstock. I cut them out and used them for our read the room activity. I used wood clothespins and colored on them with markers, for white I used white tape that I had. I intentionally did not make any blue clothespins to practice adding/subtracting zero. This seems to be easy for some and hard for others. We then matched all of the clothespins to the correct card and counted them. We recorded how many clothespins were on each card. After recording the numbers we moved onto adding 2 cards together and filling in the addition problems on the recording sheet. The students did so well, I was impressed by how much attention they paid to the counting and recording sheet. For my lower students I know thi...

I have just uploaded a set of 10 free math practice worksheets only available for free here on my blog. These worksheets are great for differentiated instruction because they can be used several different ways. Each sheet practices counting on dice to either add, subtract or multiply, asks you to draw the dots or write the number and then tally the answer. The last few sheets focus specifically on Greater than, less than and equal to using bugs, numbers and tally marks. Click on my freebies page to get all ten worksheets! I hope you enjoy them. These sheets were created as part of my Bugs-Math-and-Literacy-unit-110-pages-of-centers-and-worksheets on TpT, check it out for more great printables, centers, activities and worksheets. Enjoy!