'Eggcellent'

Last week brought a lot of seasonal activities onto the shelves in our classroom.  This child is working on building fine motor control and strength by hanging the Easter eggs on the tree.  Notice the books in the background.  These emergent readers have been enjoying themselves reading these song books with friends, by themselves and to the whole class at line.  If you have any song books at home that you would like to share with us, please send them in.  We have had a ball with The Five Little Ducks, The Wheels on the Bus, and Five Little Monkeys!

This student is also strengthening his fine motor muscles, using the tongs to pick up the eggs, but he is also working on simple addition.  Inside each egg is an addition equation.  The student uses the blue beads to help him solve the equation.  For example, the equation might be 7+3=?  the student fills one cup with seven beads and the next with 3 beads.  We worked on counting on from the largest number, so the student then determines which number is larger and then adds the smaller number to that.  This concept of counting on from the largest number can sometimes be very difficult for children who have not had a concrete introduction to math like this.  Once the student finishes the equation, he writes it down on his record sheet.

These children were working on graphing data that they collected from a jelly bean sort!  The children worked in pairs to sort out their jelly beans by color and then used tally marks to record their data.  They then took the data collected on the tally mark sheet and turned that into a bar graph!  

 

I found these little glass egg dishes a few weeks ago at the craft store, at the time, I did not know what I would use them for, but when I was setting up this activity, I knew 'eggactly' what to use!  The children loved them!  The kids did such a wonderful job working in pairs.  It was heartwarming to listen to them work and see how industrious they have become.  They are so smart!

This is just a picture of the tally mark sheet the children used for data collection.