Math This Week

Our most important goal for kindergarten math is for kids to verbalize their ideas and start to share their thinking. We'd much rather have a child explain the strategies of how she arrived at her answer rather than simply tell us the answer. We've been practicing explaining our thinking and listening to others, trying to repeat the ideas we've heard and decide if we agree with those ideas. So far, this week in math we've been working on Inventory Bags, Twenty Frame and Counting Jar.

In Twenty Frame, kids have a twenty frame; a die with one, two, and three on the sides; and a cup of twenty pennies. With a partner, they roll the die and gradually fill the frame in with one, two or three pennies. Along the way, we ask them how many pennies they have and how many more they need to fill the frame. We've heard lots of clever strategies for counting the pennies.

In Inventory Bags, partners take a paper bag full of some number of classroom objects. They count the contents and record their answer on a worksheet. We did this earlier in the year, but this time we're really pushing them to record more than one way of showing their answer. So now in addition to just the answer (ie: 12), we've been seeing lots of equations, for example, 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 = 12.

Counting Jar is something we've been doing all year long. First, children count the objects in the counting jar. In September, it was a small number of all the same kind of object. Now that it's April, the counting jar has a bigger number, and mixed objects. After the children count the objects in the counting jar, they record that number in two ways. First, they put the same number of buttons on their plate. Then, they record how many in their counting jar books.