Activities, ideas, and discussion helping teachers think through maths in classrooms.
February 25, 2013
Melinda Chum is one of many teachers who have found great ways to do math with Donald Crews’ wonderful picture book 10 Black Dots. Children love going through the pages, exploring how 2 black dots form the eyes on a fox or 4 black dots can be seen as the tires on a vehicle.
As a little boy adds more and more trimmings to a snowman on each page, children can chant along and experience the growing pattern: “4 prickly pinecones, 3 striped scarves, 2 bright blue mittens, and…
Olivia Trevino’s preschool class at Marsh Elementary School took advantage of all the winter weather to explore picture books about mittens. The Mitten by Jim Aylesworth and The Mitten by Alvin Tresselt are two delightful…
Sorting things into categories is one of the ways mathematics enters into our daily life. Talking about attributes and qualities such as size, shape, texture, and color encourages children to look more closely at things.
Sharon Hogan and her preschool class at Peterson School had all kinds of fun with the way Eric Carle’s The Secret Birthday Message plays with the two main faces of geometry—shapes and spatial sense.
Wanda Ocasio of Inter-American School saw the opportunity to use a Three Bears sorting lesson to investigate her preschoolers’ understanding of sorting, as well as explore this Big Idea in the context of a multilingual…
There are any number of wonderful books that give children very concrete images to show how big creatures are and to make comparisons to their own size.
There’s nothing like a stack of attractive counting books to help young children explore number. However, it’s worth taking the time to analyze exactly how the numbers in the book are put to work, so…
We find that one sure fire way to warm up children’s attitude towards mathematics is to build math activities and lessons out of the books they all love to read. When we start to sort…
Daniela Giralt at Gunsaulus Elementary, a 2010-11 Early Math participant, used the book Dog’s Colorful Day by Emma Dodd to help her preschoolers explore the Big Ideas of counting. First in the whole group, children…