Math Centers and random things…

Holy bananas! The first 10 days of school went so fast!  I’ve had so much fun getting to know my new kinders, but I sure am exhausted!

I don’t have much for you here…just a few randoms and our math centers from last week!

Here are the sweet little handprint puzzles!  The card is from Kim Adsit’s site – it’s a free download!  I had the kiddos decorate the envelope too.  So sweet!

We started out with colors and shapes and used Julie Lee’s Brown Bear unit a lot! One of my favorite activities was this glue practice sheet!  The kiddos loved it (despite some tired hands, and some blobs of glue!)  I might have to do another one again soon…

Here’s a quick and easy one for the color blue…

I used my 3/4” circle punch for the “blueberries”.  Super quick! Click on the picture below to download!

Our first go at math centers! We had 3 “real” centers and a couple of exploration centers.  Before we did the dice rolling independently we did an activity whole group, so everyone got practice and learned the rules for rolling the dice!

The brown bear pages are from Julie Lee’s brown bear pack.

1. Roll and write: this was a little challenging for some, but I really got a good picture of who could and who couldn’t write their numbers!

2. Dice roll and dob.  I just used a plain die and used a sharpie to add the shapes. (We used bingo dobbers)

3. Counting and one-to-one correspondence.  I worked closely with this group – again it showed me what kind of beginning skills my little guys have.

4. This one is a lakeshore counting box – The Candy Jar – great for beginning centers and practicing number ID and one-to-one.

5. We had to do some exploring with unifix cubes before we started patterning with them this week!!

Letters in our names...

This was a quick, fun activity that we did the first week of school.  I typed all of the children's names in a document, and changed the font from black to gray.  Each letter was in its own box.  (I made a table).  I'll use these same tables for name puzzles in a couple of weeks.  The children each got their own name, traced the letters in their name, cut it out and glued them on the red strip in order.  This simple project gave me a very quick, informal assessment on who understood left to right directionality, who knew the letters in their name, as well as if they knew what order their names went in.  I had a few kiddos with upside down letters, and names that went from right to left.

 The next day, we  sorted the names by the number of letters it had.  Each child counted their own name and placed it in the correct spot on our floor graph.  The children were all very excited when it was their turn to count the letters in their name!

We will continue with many more name activities during the first weeks of school!