SCHEDULE CHANGES
The second semester has brought about several changes in Kindergarten! We have a new Gym time and a new Music time. This change has lead to several additional schedule changes for us, as well! We will be moving our snack to the afternoon, with our milk break, rather than keeping them separate. This will allow us more time for the second, and most fun, change to our schedule: MATH STATIONS!
We did give math stations a try near the beginning of the school year, but they just did not work out. During Math Stations, we have five activities out and children do one station each day of the week, until they have visited all five. Two groups work with a teacher (Mrs. Muller or I) and three groups must work independently. Earlier in the year, there was way too much arguing and not enough children staying on task to make the Math Station time productive and enjoyable, so we gave it up for a while. The children were disappointed.
After a long discussion about why we had given them up and what we need to do to keep them, we started having Math Stations again last week. The kids LOVED IT! And it went amazingly well! I'm really glad to be able to bring them back because I have so many fun activities just waiting to be part of this fun learning time. Many of the stations are math games so the children don't even realize they are practicing math skills!
Since many of these independent stations are games, the children get to practice many social skills as well, such as being fair, being good sports, taking turns, not bragging, etc. These are VERY difficult concepts for some kindergartners. Each day, I remind children about fair ways to decide who goes 1st (rock-paper-scissors, eeny-meeny-miny-mo, roll the dice-high #/low # goes 1st, etc), how to behave if they win/lose, and how to work out minor conflicts without my help. We're getting better everyday :)
Here are pictures from last week's Math Stations:
Cootie! One of my childhood favorites :)
In this station, children had to cover the same shape three different ways using the Pattern Blocks.
This is a reasoning game called Secret Square. One child hides a penny under a certain picture. The others take turns asking good yes/no questions to eliminate some pictures until one picture is left or someone guesses where the penny is.
Each week will have SMARTBoard Math Station. This week it was a "Connect the Dots" Game.
Click here to play on your computer!
And here are some photos from today of this week's math stations. Since Wednesday is the 100th day of school, each station has something to do with that magic number!
This SMARTBoard Game is called "Race to 100. Children are on two teams. Teams take turns "Rolling" the die on the SMARTBoard by clicking it. Then they get to "turn over" that many numbers on their 100 grid. The 1st team to 100 is the winner!
This group is stringing 100 Fruit Loops on a Necklace. We talked about how 100 is essentially 10 groups of 10, so before they could begin, they put 10 pieces in each of the 10 boxes on their grid.
At this station, children are using 10 strips with 10 stamps to make a "Crown"!
To play the "100 Tallies Dice Game" children compete against a partner to see who can make 100 tallies first. They take turns rolling a die and making that many tallies on their sheet.
Chutes and Ladders, (another childhood favorite!) is another game where children will race to 100!
