What's new in Math?

So much Math, so little time to write about it!  I am just getting my energy back after my bout with pneumonia and want to let you know what we've been working on since our exploration of shapes (which continues on of course!).  We are always working to make number sense very concrete for the students.  That is, what numbers are and what they represent or what they mean.  Each day during our Morning Meeting there are several of our jobs that relate to these concepts directly.  The children take turns adding numbers to our calendar and our hundreds chart, we keep track of the weather with a graph, each day we add a penny to our coin jar and monitor that with a set of ten frames.  These provide visual and tactile experiences of the numbers, as well as number recognition.  We are beginning to count by tens and fives, as well as by ones as our numbers grow.  We use our various charts to notice what more than and less than mean and always invite the students to explain their thinking - there are so many ways to figure things out!!

We have extended these ideas by creating individual graphs and class graphs such as our apple tasting graph and our pumpkin seed predictions chart.  Some fun games that we have played include Dice Racing and Shut the Box.  I am going to send copies of these home, along with a set of dice so that your children can teach you how to play!  Any games that use dice or dominoes or have the children moving spaces, all support their understanding of numbers and increasing and decreasing value.  We would love for you to play lots of games at home!  We also took the time to count how many seeds we found in each of our pumpkins by using ten frames.  We discovered that the smaller pumpkin had slightly more seeds than our larger pumpkin, 385 to 370!!

We introduced seriation - putting things in order by size - with several activities and have noticed the students modeling this with their lunches and sometimes in their play.  We are hearing the connected vocabulary as well; big, bigger, biggest, small, medium and large, etc.

Recently, we have begun working on patterns which has been a tricky concept to grasp and explain. We work on extending patterns, creating patterns and recognizing them.  Today, two children identified different patterns in our Morning Meeting, one in our calendar and another in our hundreds chart.  But, we were tricked by our ten frames, which everyone agreed had a pattern but in fact does not.  I don't think they were convinced that there isn't a pattern there!  It would be fun to help them explore patterns at home or anywhere that you might notice them.  They really are everywhere!