May Activities

8 days left!

 

I can hardly believe it!

 

Usually by this time of the year I am so exhausted and ready to sleep in.  But for some reason this year, I'm still going strong.

 

I think it's because I'm worried that this may be the end of kindergarten for me.  I love teaching kindergarten and feel so passionate about it.  But we only have room for 5 kindergarten teachers next year, so someone has to move.  And I'm afraid it's going to be me.

 

Like really afraid. 

 

I want to throw up every time I think about having to move away from my awesome team of K teachers, my classroom, and the sweet little babies that come into my room and heart every July.  And then I remind myself to be thankful that I have a job and get to do what I love everyday.  And tell myself that moving grades is not the end of the world.

 

And then my stomach gets in knots and I want to throw up again. 

 

We are all anxiously waiting to see what happens.  I just hope it happens soon before I give myself an ulcer from stressing about it.

 

So anyway, I think I am subconsciously making sure that I enjoy and savor these last days because I'm afraid they may be my last hurrah as a K teacher.

 

Now that I've made myself sick to my stomach again, lets talk about what I've been up to this past week.

 

I had been trying to think of a cute photo concept for the last page of my year end book.  And this is what I came up with.  I thought it was super cute!

I blogged a little last week about introducing my rekenreks.

 

My kids love these things!!!

 

So I thought I'd share a little more about how I'm using them.

Number Talks are only supposed to last about 5 min.  And this is super hard to stick to when your kids are engaged and learning.

 

But I just had to remind myself that a little each day will help keep them excited and engaged with the rekenreks.

 

So this past week I started choosing one number each day.  I started with 5 on Monday and ended with 10 on Friday.

 

First I had my kids show the number of the day with green beads or pink beads, not both.  After they counted out the correct number of beads, they hold their rekenrek to their chest, with the beads facing them, to show me they are ready, and so that no one else can look at their beads.

Then when I say "show me," they flip their boards around while still holding them to their chest, so that I can see everyone's.  I do a quick check to make sure everyone has the correct number of beads.

 

After we show the number of the day with one color of beads, I have them show me the same number again.  This time using a mixture of green and pink.

 

I do have 2 kids who consistently get confused on this part.  If I ask the class to show me 6 using both pink and green beads, they show me 6 pink beads and 6 green beads.  So I have been strategically placing these students right in front of me so that I can quickly remind and correct if needed.

Then I remembered something that we talked about in our Number Talks meetings.  (The elementary teachers in my county did a book study on Number Talks throughout this past school year.)  It was recommended that we record what we are talking about in case we need to reference it later and so that the kids can have another visual representation.

 

So since we've been studying addition and subtraction we made our mixture of green and pink beads into addition sentences.

 

I pulled out my math journal, yes I have an example one for myself, and started recording the different ways we made each number.

 

The kids loved this!!

 

We made the beads on top the first number of the sentence and the beads on the bottom row were the second number in the sentence.

 

They loved coming up with different ways to show the number that no one else had thought of.

 

I thought this would also be a good way to start laying the groundwork for the commutative property because I'm pretty sure first grade now teaches addition properties.

Then we counted up all the ways we made each number.

 

Yes, I purposely left out the addition sentences with 0.

 

Next week I'm planning on writing some sentences and having the kids show me the beads to match.

Also, I may move onto teen numbers.  I want them to see the entire top row, the green beads, represent the 10 and then the pink beads to represent the extra.  Similar to a ten frame.

We've also been learning about the ocean, so we made fish!

 

They drew and cut these fish out all by themselves.  I did an example first, but each child created and colored their own.

 

I love how different they all are!

We also drew some seaweed and coral for our fishies.

And we cut a lighter blue to represent the sky, and the wave pattern.  So we drew a sun and seagulls to go with our sky.

 And we also celebrated our very last classroom birthday!

 

I love these little birthday books, they've been quite a hit this year.

 

I love seeing how much our birthday books have improved since our first in August.

 

Check out my blog post on celebrating birthdays here.



This birthday book is a freebie in my TpT store.  Check it out here.

Math Lately - Journals and Number Talks

The past few weeks have been state standardized testing weeks at my school.

The 3rd and 4th graders took their test the last week of April and the 1st and 2nd graders took their test the first week of May.

 

I am very lucky that I don't have to give my kindergarteners a standardized test.

We did, two years ago, and it was a nightmare.

 

Then the next year, my county decided that testing kindergarteners was developmentally inappropriate. 

 

Correct!

 

Even though we are exempt from the tests, our whole school is affected by them.

So for the past two weeks we have had no morning encore classes.

 

That means no bathroom break for me until 11:20, yikes!

 

That also means no break from our classroom for my kids until lunch.

 

So we have been having fun with GoNoodle.

 

If you have not tried GoNoodle, you need to do so now!

 

There are Zumba Kid videos, running videos, stretching videos, coordination videos.  And my personal favorite, the indoor recess videos!



There are currently ten indoor recess videos and they each have a collection of videos from stretching, to zumba, to running in place, to balance, and then a cool down.

 

They are perfect because you can pick which one you want to do based on how long it is.

I think my kids love the field trip videos best.

 

They have to duck, run, move to the side, etc, in order to get to their destination.  And then you read fun facts about the destination.

 

One of my girls said "An ear?! We worked ourselves to death for 5 minutes to take a field trip to an ear?!" 

Yep, you did!

And you might be a little dramatic.

 

There are also balance and deep breathing videos.

We do these when we need to calm down.

 

So with no breaks in the mornings these past couple of weeks, we've had more time to go deeper into our learning. 

 

Which I love!

 

My kids beg for math journals everyday, but some days we just don't have time.

 

Well they have gotten their wish because we've been able to do math journals every day for a few weeks now.

 

I made these subtraction journal prompts for my class, but I hope to post them on TpT this summer.

We've also had time to do Number Talks everyday!

 

We've practiced with ten frames and dot cards, so it was time to pull out the rekenreks.

 

I made these over spring break.  You can check out how I made them here.

 

First I showed them mine and we talked about how to clear our board (push all the beads to the left).

Then I showed them how they could use them to show different numbers by counting the beads.

 

We also talked about how to take care of them and handle them gently.

 

Then I passed them out and let them have a few minutes to play, practice counting beads, and clearing their boards.

Then I started asking them to show me different numbers.

 

I started with single digits.

I just wanted them to practice counting their beads as the moved them to the right.



Then I had them show me a number, still single digits, but they had to use some green beads and some pink beads to make the number.

 

I will totally use these next year when we begin composing and decomposing numbers.

They did really good with this and had fun turning to their Peanut Butter and Jelly partner to see if their partner built the number the same way as them or differently.

They loved them!

 

We will definitely be using these quite a bit in the last few weeks.

I thought I'd also show how I'm storing them.

Simple storage, close at hand and easy to access.