Monday 28 October 2013

Math Monday (Shapes)

I'm back again for Math Monday at A Burst of First.   I enjoyed looking through lots of the ideas last week.  While I do not see myself as particularly mathematically minded or great at Math, I do really enjoy teaching math skills to my Kindy group.  It's so rewarding watching their skills develop and there is such visible development in the early years. 

One thing I noticed earlier in the year was that when we were doing drawing activities and I asked, for example, my students to draw some windows on their houses, there were a lot of oval or circular shaped 'square' windows.

That's a pretty good self-drawn star on the right for a just turned five year old!

So I thought I'd get making and put together this little set of shape drawing practice cards for my students to use.  There are three different cards available and they cover drawing practice for circles, squares, ovals, rectangles, triangles, stars, hearts and diamonds.  There are three or four shapes to trace around and then a spot for the student to have a go at drawing the shape on their own.  It has really helped my students with their drawing skills!

I tend to laminate my fine motor skills sheets and we rotate them around first thing in the morning but you could just give them out as an activity sheet to take home as well.

This one is another freebie over at my TPT store.  If you head over and download it, I'd love it if you could leave me some feedback too!



  

Tuesday 22 October 2013

Math Monday (Graphing)

We're one week down in Term 4 over here in Australia and my Kindy (US pre-K) students are just gobbling up any learning I can throw at them. I've got a few students who have just started to 'click' with their learning and things are making sense to their little brains now. It's such an exciting time of the year and there are many proud moments as my students do things they couldn't previously.

Like graphing. We've been doing a bit of graphing now and again since Term 3, mainly whole class graphing. They had done one individual graph last term and then I decide to throw them in the deep end (or so I thought) in the first week of term with another individual graph.

We are learning about Our Five Senses at the moment and started the term off with Sight. So we went on an I Spy walk. Not only did I expect them to make their own graph but I also wanted them to do something we haven't done before, tallying. We didn't go with the classic tallying, instead I put the numbers 1 - 7 next to an object and each time they saw something they circled the next number.


Again, I was a little unsure how they would manage with this seeing as we have never done anything like it before but they followed the instructions pretty well.  Of course, everyone saw different amounts of the objects depending on where they were looking.  And after doing a great job on their tallying, they came back to class and did a brilliant job on their graphing.  I thought I would be doing lots of assisting but it was mostly just sitting back and making sure they were on track and discussing all their findings with them.


Such a proud teacher moment
You can currently get the I Spy Walk and Graph sheets for free at my TPT store.  In time they will become a part of my Five Senses package but that is still being worked up as we do the theme in the classroom.


Also, I can show you this sneak peak of something else on its way to my TPT store.  I really love how this is turning out, not only good learning opportunities but it looks so pretty!  Keep your eyes peeled...


 This is my first time joining in with Math Monday over at A Burst of First.  Hopefully I'll be back again with another resource or idea to share next week!