Content Format: Article
Activities, ideas, and discussion helping teachers think through maths in classrooms.
Series: Book Ideas
5 Books and Songs for Exploring Growing Patterns
August 28, 2019
Cumulative tales and rhymes illustrate growing patterns, typically an increase or decrease by one on each page. As the growing pattern is revealed through the story, children get excited because they can figure out "what comes next."
- Topic: Pattern
- Age/Grade Level: Pre-K, Kindergarten, 1st Grade
- Tags Animals, Culture, Jacqueline Woodson, Graeme Base, Demi, We Had a Picnic This Sunday Past, The Waterhole, Two of Everything, One Grain of Rice, Lily Toy Hong
Series: Book Ideas July 29, 2019
Different Types of Shapes and Nonexamples to Spark Geometric Learning
It’s up to us to find, share, and talk about a variety of shapes with children in ways that expand their understanding and build connections between the shapes drawn on paper and the concrete objects…
- Topic: Precursor Concepts, Shape
- Age/Grade Level: Infants, Toddlers, Pre-K, Kindergarten, 1st Grade
- Tags Tana Hoban, Attribute, Shapes Shapes Shapes, Now What? A Math Tale, Robie H. Harris
Series: Ideas at Work June 8, 2019
Build Tangram Shapes with Do-It-Yourself Puzzles
A tangram puzzle consists of seven pieces — five triangles and two quadrilaterals made from one square. Tangrams originated in China hundreds of years ago. They traveled to Europe in the 1800’s, where they gained…
- Topic: Spatial Relationships, Shape
- Age/Grade Level: Pre-K, Kindergarten, 1st Grade, 2nd Grade
- Tags Play, Family Math, Grandfather Tang's Story, Ann Tompert
Series: Focus on Play April 29, 2019
A New Focus for Familiar Card Games
Here you can download cards and simple-to-learn game ideas to help young children build their understanding of early math concepts such as cardinality, composing and comparing numbers, and allowing them to subitize.
- Topic: Number Sense
- Age/Grade Level: Pre-K, Kindergarten
- Tags Subitizing, Play, Games, Equivalence, Dot cards, Family Math, Cardinality, En Español, download
Series: About the Collaborative April 23, 2019
Teachers as Knowledgeable Others in the Spotlight at Math Conference
Everyone knows it’s better to teach someone how to fish than to hand out fish. In terms of professional development, this philosophy means empowering classroom teachers to grow their own practice by facilitating the learning…
Series: Book Ideas March 24, 2019
3 Books That Encourage Simple Graph Explorations with Young Ones
At the heart of it, graphing in the early years is about quantifying information in order to answer a question. That requires children to organize data in some visible way so that comparisons and generalizations…
- Topic: Data Analysis
- Age/Grade Level: Pre-K, Kindergarten, 1st Grade
- Tags Graphing, Shoes, Comparing, Mitsumasa Anno, Anno’s Flea Market, Which Would You Rather Be?, William Steig, Whose Shoes?, Stephen R. Swinburne
Series: Focus on the Child January 29, 2019
Many Ways to See How Many
Regardless of how high a preschooler can rote count, a child’s sense of what those numbers actually mean develops gradually. We call this understanding number sense, and it requires relating numbers to real quantities.
- Topic: Number Sense
- Age/Grade Level: Pre-K, Kindergarten
- Tags Estimation, Unifix Cubes, Subitizing, Gesture, Dot cards
Series: Book Ideas January 11, 2019
4 Fun Books that Explore Math, Patterns, and Sequences
From an early age, children notice and appreciate patterns in the world around them. Patterns and sequences of different kinds begin to pop up all over the place, especially in the books that children love.
- Topic: Pattern
- Age/Grade Level: Pre-K, Kindergarten, 1st Grade
- Tags Animals, Eric Carle, Bill Martin Jr., Trudy Harris, Audrey Wood, Pattern Bugs, Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See?, I Went Walking, The Napping House, Sue Williams
Series: Ideas at Work November 7, 2018
Counting on Good Food for the Holidays
Traditions around food and feasts provide rich opportunities to connect math at school with children’s experiences at home. From Diwali to Thanksgiving, fall is a season of special meals with loved ones.
- Topic: Counting
- Age/Grade Level: Pre-K, Kindergarten, 1st Grade
- Tags Seasonal, Holiday, Cathryn Falwell, Family Math, Feast for 10
Series: Book Ideas October 22, 2018
A Holiday with Too Many Tamales
How is it possible to have too many tamales? Well, Maria finds out in the holiday storybook Too Many Tamales by author Gary Soto.
- Topic: Number Operations
- Age/Grade Level: Pre-K, Kindergarten, 1st Grade, 2nd Grade, 3rd Grade
- Tags Seasonal, Food, Holiday, Books, Gary Soto, Family Math, Too Many Tamales
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