Valentine Math Fact Sensory Center

Need a last minute Valentine activity for the week?

I have a few kids that need to practice their fine motor skills this year, so lately I've been really interested in trying to incorporate more sensory activities into our day.  This sensory center cost me $4 to make and 30 minutes to put together!  I found all of the supplies at Dollar Tree. 

You need: 

1 egg carton

1 bag of Valentine table scatter

1 bag of Valentine Pompoms

1 bag of red basket filler ( a little goes a lonngg way!) 

1 bag of 100 foam hearts (mine were stickers. I separated the small and large ones, saved them for another craft, and just used the medium sized hearts. I stuck two together so the kids wouldn't peel the backs apart, but if you just had regular foam hearts it would save some time!)  

Mix the table scatter, Pompoms, and basket filler together. I mixed mine in a gallon bag so I could just pour it into a bin when I got to school. 

It ended up making a nice mix of soft, slippery, and scratchy textures.

Cut the top off the egg carton and number the cups 1-12 (or any other sums you need your kiddos to practice) 

Write facts on the plain foam hearts. Again, you can differentiate for the needs of your students! We are working on understanding the difference between plus and minus signs, as well as fluency in facts under 10, so that's what I focused on. You could also do all teen numbers, draw shapes and sort by the number of sides, or simply do a sort and count by color or size of the hearts. It really just depends. 

Mix the facts into your "base." 

Students pull out the hearts and put them in the cup that equals the fact.  I plan to have mine use tweezers to sort through the bin and find the fact hearts.

And that's it!  How else could you differentiate this idea in your class? 

Five for Friday: SDE Conference!

This week I got to attend the Maryland SDE conference for kindergarten teachers!  This is the smaller version of the one that is held in Las Vegas every summer.  I came away so energized to implement some new ideas in my kindergarten classroom during the second half of the year! 

We arrived and checked into the hotel, where the conference was held AND it was connected to the mall!!!  Living in a rural area, it was such a novelty to get up in the morning and walk to Starbucks at 7am!  (Oh, and did you know that people actually walk malls in the early morning for exercise??  Like, they intentionally go there to walk early in the morning?  Maybe I'm the only one just discovering this...but...apparently it's an actual thing?!)

Attended a critical thinking workshop and made these little catapults!  It's amazing what you can do with Popsicle sticks, rubber bands, and a Play Doh lid!

Kathy Griffin was one of the keynote speakers and I have so many good ideas to engage my class.  If I could only remember what half the notes I scribbled and pictures I took actually meant...

On Wednesday I went back to my classroom and had parent teacher conference day.  It was nice to be able to have some time in between conferences to work on planning and creating upcoming lessons based on some of the strategies I learned.

One of the most game-changing workshops I attended was Angie Bonthuis' workshop on "Diving Deeper into Centers."  Wow...I don't have a single picture because I was so busy writing down "aha's" and "must do's."  I have been dying to reorganize my centers all year- they were driving me crazy, but since I am in a new school and new classroom I figured the reorganization would have to be a summer project.  Her methods make so much sense to me and I am thrilled I finally found a way to set up my centers to include both play and content learning that is going to be easy to keep up with.  And, my team is getting validated this year.  One of the components is choice centers.  I doubled the choices my students had for both math and literacy centers yesterday and they did great! 

I also attended one of Angie Bonthuis' math workshops.  We tried one of her problem of the day strategies on the board yesterday.  I called up three students to work out the problem, gave them each a different colored marker, and sat back and watched their thought process.  It was so cool to have them "be the teachers" and watch as my other students encouraged and gave them ideas.  This is the FIRST TIME my students have seen a problem like this, and they rocked it!!  We will definitely be doing these every day, following the types of word problems in progression that Angie shared in her talk.  Her website is www.ilovekindergarten.com and she has everything that she showed us on her website for FREE!

On a totally different note, it has been so rainy and snowy that the ducks are swimming at the gas stations!  We pulled up to get gas and I thought this was so funny that I had to take a picture!

Chinese fortune cookie for the win...

Finally, in science and math we have been working with bowling pins to observe motion.  For math in small groups, we took turns bowling while other students kept track of the score on 10-frames.  This was great to practice addition, discuss ways to make 10 and answer "how many more?"  They loved it and begged to play again the next day.  I found a table-top bowling set that I put in our newly redesigned science-center so the kids can continue exploring it! 

Have a great week!  Enjoy the rest of the Five for Friday posts over at Doodle Bugs Teaching!