The Crazy Pre-K Classroom

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...

After having a super fun week with my kiddos studying corn I decided to put everything we did down on paper and give it away for free! It all started with a pesky common core objective involving measurement but turned out to be so much more! My teacher freind Bev Fleming and I decided that our Autumn theme would be best served by studying fall veggies, which eventually lead us to corn. We decided to create a cornstalk that would "grow" all week long. I made a base out of wood and used an old lightbulb holder to place pvc pipe in. I bought 4 couplers to attach the pvc pipe together as it grew. Here is a picture of our cornstalk on day 3. It grew from 1 foot all the way to 9 feet, with 5 ears of corn on it. (this is my little boy, Collin) I used butcher paper and green paint to decorate the pvc pipe in sections so it could be easily assembled each day. I attached the paper with hot glue. For the ears of corn I glued 2 pieces cut into corn shape leaving a hole large enough t...

Hello Everyone,      It is giveaway time again, this month's prize goes to Christi Squires. She has won my Bug-Jar-Math Unit from TpT. She will enjoy 39 pages of bug themed counting activities including 1-10 bug jars for counting and one to one coorespondence, worksheets, sorting mats and more. Thank you all for being followers! Next months giveaway is: Frog-Fun-Math-Centers  (I changed it to a larger and more recent unit!) Frog fun math centers contains nine printable centers and practice worksheets for your pre-k to 1st grade students. Included centers teach and review: time, number words to 50, patterns, addition, subtraction, greater than, less than and equal to,non-satndard measurement and more. You can view some of my students work from this unit here on my blog under the posts: Tips for teaching number word recognition Clothespin color matching, counting and addition center Why teach non-standard measurement? Teaching time and clock concepts in Pr...

Non-standard measurement is using common objects to measure versus using a ruler or measuring tape. You can use just about anything, like legos, blocks, pencils. Using common objects and pictures make the introduction of measurement fun. I have found that using pictures of animals from the weekly/monthly theme to measure items in the classroom is fun and kinesthetic for my students. I have created several different worksheets that teach non-standard measurement: On this worksheet the children were asked to cut out a set of each of the bugs shown. Each bug is a different size therefore requiring more or less bugs to measure. I instructed them to start at the bottom of the tree and work their way up to the top. They were then to count how many bugs it took to measure the tree and record that number next to the proper bug. Even though this student's 6 is backwards she ended up with all of the correct answers. Once we were finished with the worksheet I had each child pick a pile of o...