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!

Amazing Attributes

This afternoon I had one of those great teaching moments.  I am so glad I thought to grab a camera midway through!  The only thing better would have been to video it.  There was so much good "math talk" and "aha!" moments in this lesson. 

My kids are working on sorting by attributes.  Yesterday we talked about comparing two buttons that were alike and different, and explaining why.  Today I extended the lesson to have them use multiple buttons to really solidify the vocabulary I want them to be using.  (Many were still saying "same" for "alike.) 

As I was working with my first group, they were getting the hang of it easily and so I was thinking about how I could challenge my next group, the high flyers. 

(You know how that goes right? You can teach a small group while simultaneously thinking about your next lesson, the upcoming parent meeting, scanning the room for those off task, shushing loud voices, writing a nurse pass and talking to the secretary who walked in, right?) 

Anyway, to go along with my goal of having them work together more often, it started with the idea of giving them a small basket of buttons to sort with a partner, and then have them explain to their partner why they sorted them into groups. And suddenly it occurred to me to draw different numbers of circles on the table to have them sort the same buttons various ways.  I told them they had to come up with a "rule" for each circle. 

We got started with just two groups.  Two little girls were quickly sorting by "squares and circles" and got to the bottom of the basket and found two triangles!  They said "Let's just leave them out."  :)  Most partners ended up doing "same color, different color." Here is where it got interesting. One pair had stacked buttons WITHIN a circle by the number of buttonholes.  They had various stacks of buttons with two holes and stacks with four holes and told me that was how they sorted them.

I don't have a picture of the "two group" buttons, but I asked the student "If your rule is two-hole buttons, then why are the four-hole buttons in the same circle?  Do you think it belongs there?"  He looked puzzled, and then the "OH!!" moment came.  He explained to his partner, and they quickly sorted them into just two groups. 

I then told the kids I was going to challenge them.  Their faces got excited when I drew three (THREE!) circles in front of them. 

 

I was expecting them to pick it up easily by now, but they didn't!  Again, most did "one color, another color, other colors."

 

 

 

 

These are my two highest students.  They gave me puzzled looks when I asked them to explain how they were sorting and said "We need some more time."  It was interesting, because they realized the color sorting wasn't quite right, and were trying other combinations.  They finally realized they could sort by shape! 

 

 

 

 

For the record, there are only three shapes in all of the baskets.  :)  But no one seemed to pick up on that at first. 

 

 

More colors...

 

Then, we tried four circles. 

 

Now we could do colors more appropriately.  :) 

I wish you could have heard the math talk going on around the table, as they discussed how to group their buttons and which particular buttons belonged in which groups.  I also wish you could see their excited, engaged faces.  Something about providing the boundary of the circles and increasing them one at a time made it really exciting. 

One student even said we needed eight circles so we could do two rules...number of buttonholes AND colors.  (!!!) 

Before I knew it, we were wayyyy over our small group time, and they begged me to do this again tomorrow.  So we will, and I'll try it with my other groups too. 

I'm still waiting for them to realize that there are also two sizes of shapes; large and small.  :) 

March Math..."While I'm Waiting" Activities

Just a quick midweek post about some "while I'm waiting" activities that I recently created. These are for those times when you have a small group waiting while you circulate getting everyone settled at their stations. They are nothing earth shattering and literally took all of 45 minutes for me to make. But the kids can easily take them out and work independently while they are waiting for me. 

Half of these have glitter on one side, and half do not. 

Recently I purchased several packs of these foam shamrocks and gold coins, thinking they would make some fun activities. My class is working on composing and decomposing numbers 11 through 19; especially the concept of 10 plus some more.  My below level group is still having a lot of trouble with ten frames...filling boxes in the right order, and realizing that if one frame is full, it simply equals ten and they don't have to count EVERY SINGLE BOX EVERY TIME. 

I laminated work mats from our math program. (So I can't share these, but I'm sure 10 frame templates are easy enough to find!). I have numbers 11 through 19 written on index cards. They each take a work mat and draw a card. They then have to build that number using the gold coins (which, by the way, make everything SO much more special!) 

I wanted them to have a way to self check, so if they flip the card over, I have drawn out circles and they can check their work.

All packed up and ready for the next time!  

My next game I call "the shamrock sort." It is for my high group, which really needs to be challenged. I've written three different ways to represent the numbers 11 through 19 on the shamrocks. The shamrocks get spread out and the group has to work together to sort them. For example, here are the three ways to show 19:  (I may add more 'ways' such as tally marks and more addition and subtraction facts, but this was enough for us to start!)

Again, I wanted a self checking component, so when they think they have found three of the same number, they flip the shamrocks over to check them.  

Tada!

Finally, I needed to use the glitter-sided shamrocks, so I made a little sight word memory matching game for my below level group: 

I used the first 10 sight words for set 1, and made a second set of the next 10 words for my mid level group. The foam does shed glitter quite easily, but the kids don't seem to mind being "sparkled" :).  

They love being able to pull these activities out while they are waiting for me, and I love that they are occupied with a constructive warm up! 

Like I said, nothing earth shattering but simple and fun. I'm sure there are many other ways to use the coins and shamrocks. What else could you do with these?