Math Time in February

The approach in our classroom is to allow the children to choose the work that they would like to do.  This makes the children vested in what the choose and their own learning.  Sometimes people criticize this method saying that the children get to make all the decisions and thus aren't learning everything that is taught in a standard classroom.  This is where I disagree.  You see each and every work that is placed on the shelf, for the children, has a specific learning goal in mind and fits in with those (teacher's favorite word GLEs - Grade Level Expectations).

Below is a sampling of hands on work children did in February.  While they did much more than just this, this is what my camera caught.

Graphing and recording candy hearts.

Addition sums with heart playing cards and heart counters.

Calendar work.  Practicing number formation and sequencing.

This is called the stamp game.  All of the children had the chance to play this with me at least once before vacation.  This game builds on what they learned with the bank game.  The children no longer need the ones, tens, hundreds, and thousands beads, they can visualize what that looked like and transfer it to a more symbolic representation.  The children have not been let loose on this by themselves yet.  I still like to sit with them and make their challenges.  For example, while playing we get to talk about trading and regrouping.  When played with a guiding adult this game is an excellent concrete example of how the decimal system works when adding.  We can play by just adding the ones column, however, after playing with ones for a bit, the child always challenges me to move on to tens and hundreds.  Usually at the end of the play, I will step it up to a thousand!  They love it!

Identifying all of the even numbers 1-100.

Making specific times on the wooden clock and recording.

Skip counting by two with sea shells.

Recording time to the hour with a clock book.

Counting money using a nickel and or dime.

 

Patterning and recording in letter format, AABAABAA etc.

Using candy hearts to add.

From graphing, to telling time, from writing numbers to simple addition, from skip counting to money, I do believe we have it all!  Oh did I mention they were having a lot of fun too?  Have a "mathtastic" day!