The Crazy Pre-K Classroom

Hello All, Here is a follow up to my most recent post about the importance of math in the pre-k classroom. Today we worked on Graphs and Patterns. My class has been exposed to both of these several times in group teaching and number centers but this is the first time the children filled in the patterns and graphs on their own. I knew which ones would do well and which ones might have some trouble folllowing along. I will show you what both look like. I walked them through the patterns by first having a group pattern lesson on the carpet and then brining them to the table for the worksheet. We assigned each letter a color for the entire sheet so that there was no confusion in the switching of colors and so that I could use the colors to help them understand the pattern. A=orange, B=yellow, C=green, D=white. All typical colors of pumpkins; I even showed them pictures of each color pumpkin that I took at the pumpkin patch over the weekend but that is a different story. Back to the pattern...

Today was the 100th day of school and my class counted 100 legos, which got me thinking of all the great learning activites we could do with them: 1. Count: today we counted to 100, I passed out 10 sticks of 10 leggos, then we counted by ones to 100 and by 10's to 100. 2. Stack while counting: We stacked our legos while counting by 10's, once our tower was build we compared ourselves and common classroom objects to the height of the tower. Had I thought this out earlier I would have had a recording sheet with the items we compared. 3. Patterns: We then took our legos apart and created a few types of patterns by color and by size of legos. 4. Addition: you can add the legos themselves in groups or you can add the dots on different sizes of legos. 5. Non-Standard Measurement: Tomorrow I am going to give each child 10 legos stacks and a recording sheet. I will instruct them to measure and record how many rows of leggos long each object is. We will then also count them by 10...