Math Centers

I have to write everything down these days or it's gone forever. I have so many things that I'm working on at one time, besides being a mom and wife, that it took me forty minutes to remember how to get into this blog.
I am helping out a new first grade teacher, at another school site, this year and he/she needs math learning centers. I love creating new learning centers so this was a fun task to put my mind on. I came up with a list of a few that I know work for kinders to second grade. Here is my list:
math journals: questions or daily problems to solve
calendar journals or calendar logs: fill in the entire (box it or bag it/math their way) calendar activities, weather graph, daily number, odd/even etc. More to come on this subject.
roll the dice and graph race
number war (with a deck of cards or just numbers)
numbered cards from zero to one hundred and they have to build a number line. You can use clothes pins and a clothes line and do this outside too.
grab bag 100 grid, use old poker chips and write the numbers on the chips (place in a bag) a 100 grid, crayon and a timer, turn timer over and try to color in as many numbers as you can before the timer runs out. They love this.
skip counting worksheet
number writing worksheets
math fact fun, my book of worksheets on atozteacherstuff.com
Unit focus from math program
patterns with cubes or pattern blocks
block shapes, they build with blocks and then draw their block build and count how many blocks it took to build it and then write about it too. Double hit here!!!1
As a matter of fact the students can write about anything they do in math.
Math surveys. I need to learn how to post free materials onto the site. I have a few of these that my kids have designed over the years. They simply ask friends on the playground their question of the day. We collect the "data" and build real graphs and share our results with the other students. Big hit.
Number writing race
Draw/write with math. There are cool books that have these already done for us. Example: Two dogs and two cats. How many tails? How many noses? How many legs? etc.
I loved teaching first grade and I wish I could just take a jump drive to my brain, load it up and give it to this teacher. I can't wait to send my list and share my ideas with this teacher after the break.
On the home front, the boys and I are getting ready for Thanksgiving Day. We were going to paint gourds, but Cal Poly ran out of them, what a drag, so instead we will make paperbag turkeys instead. I think we'll try painting one of the gourds we bought back in October. I can't wait. I'm also trying to finish a few quilting projects this week. I will be done with Christmas shopping by Sunday. I have to mail out gifts to my sister's family and to my parents before they are off to Disney World. I hear boys coming into the house.

Happy Turkey Day,
T

Sharing ideas Calendar Time

If anyone out there would like to share tips and tricks with this group, please feel free. The great teaching tips I use have come from other teachers who have been there and back.

One thing that I do is have my students make our calendar pieces each month. We decide on the pattern that we'll create such as an ABAB pattern and then discuss pictures for the month. This month, for example, my students have decided on an ABCD pattern and it will be a turkey, Native American, Mayflower ship and a Pilgrim. They draw the picture, sound out how to spell the picture and then write their class number on the back. I then put them in our calendar container and pull a new student each day to put in the calendar piece. At the end of the month, I turn our calendar pieces along with our weather graph and poem into a class big book. Our calendar time is a big part of our day and the students look forward to changing our "calendar bears" clothes, graphing the weather and the several other activities we do for our calendar.

After the winter break, I'll add in a math calendar journal my students can do on their own as a math "must do". I've found great variations of this idea on other sites such as jmeacham.com. There are many teachers out there that use a type of this idea in their math program and my kinder bunnies have really enjoyed the challenge. The journal has a monthly calendar to fill in by the day, a poem for the month, graphing, and whatever else I can find that my students need to work on such as patterning, number sense, or number writing. I will begin to share samples of these ideas once I understand blogging.

Kinder Rocks

Hello Again

Well, I'm back to the blog world tonight after several weeks of sick kids at home and at school. I'm happy to report that everyone is well again and back to school. I have so many plans for this blog, but have been way to busy with life to do a good job at this for the time being. I am working on math journal topics, sight word support activities and a focus wall file folder for students to use. I won't let another two weeks go by without posting something.