Learning with Music!

Music is just one of those things.....It has the power to evoke emotions, the power to uplift, the power to motivate or even the power to make you sad and remember better days.

But the thing I love most about music is that it has the power to teach.

If you have ever taught in a K-2 classroom, you probably hear what I am saying right? I wanted to share my favourite songs, all related to Maths that helped my Kinder class last year.

1-20

Perfect for beginning counters!

Count back from 20

Counting backwards can be energetic and motivating!

Big Numbers Song

This covers numbers to 100 - I was amazed at how much this helped my kids!

Count by 2's, 5's and 10's

Skip counting galore!

Days of the Week

Months of the Year

Days and months songs by Mat of Dream English. Super catchy songs.

Do you have any favourite songs to help in the classroom?

Roll and Multiply

I would like to share a great warm up game for maths time for students who know their times tables. It is great for promoting quick thinking and fast recall of these facts.

You need a multi-sided dice. This will be the number you multiply by. Choose a 6, 10, 12 (or 20 if you want to be able to go up to 12 x but dont have the right dice). Laminate or slide into a protective sleeve to use again.

Roll the dice once (or have the teacher pick) what is the number to multiply by each time. Here I have gone with 5.

Roll the dice. Each time, multiply your initial number written in the corner by the number rolled. In the pic, I would be doing the equation 5 x 3 (3 being the number rolled).

Continue until there is a winning number.

Grab your copy by clicking the image above. There is a few different versions (with different graphics) for you to enjoy.

Shake Rattle Drop and Friends of Ten

We have been practicing our addition and friends of ten this week. I came up with a quick way to play shake rattle drop all on the one page.

If you have never played Shake Rattle Drop, you need a ten frame (or this sheet) and ten double sided counters. You also need something to record with.

Shake the counters in your hands, and drop onto the page.

We always place the red counters first and yellow sides sencond.

Write down the Friends of Ten!

Go and fill the recording sheet up! It is great practice and the kids start to notice the number patterns for Friends of Ten quite quickly.

Click on this picture to go and grab this freebie from GoogleDocs.

Enjoy!

Blocks on a bowl!

Do your kids need more visualising practice?

Blocks on a bowl is an awesome activity to help with this!

To introduce the activity, pair students up (I did similar ability levels). I gave each pair a plastic bowl and 5 counters.

One partner chooses some to put underneath (no peeking!!) and the other counters on top. The other student has to visualise how many are underneath. The first partner can then reveal if the answer was right.

1 on top, how many underneath?

4 on top, how many can you visualise underneath?

This activity is easy to differentiate for different levels and learners, simply by increasing the number of counters. We did do it for 6 counters so we could talk about our strategies of counting on and back, and then we did it again for 10 counters so we could talk about Friends of Ten.

You could also introduce a recording sheet or write on mini whiteboard

Why not try it?

Friends of Ten Bracelets - Bright Ideas!

If you haven't seen the Bright Ideas link up before, you have been missing out! Ideas from 100+ bloggers for you to implement in your classroom and all the ideas are FREE! No products to buy! How great is that?

This month my Bright Idea is Friends of Ten bracelets. We have been talking about which numbers make ten in class and although we have been working a lot with ten frames, I thought we needed to see it a little differently.

You will need some pipe cleaners and some beads (here I had a jar of cut up straw which certainly worked fine!)

We sat in a big circle and talked about the Friends of Ten. Then I distributed bowls of straws and asked the kids to thread ten pieces onto their pipe cleaner (fine motor skills and maths unite!)

As we went through the Friends of Ten, we were able to separate the straws into two separate groups. Here you can see the friends of ten are 2 (on the left) and 8.

After we had had some fun moving the straws around, I handed out whietboards and textas and we recorded what we saw.

Of course sometimes we make mistakes, but having the concrete example there was easy to draw that students attention back to the friends of ten they had had a problem with and get them to remake it. Instant assessment!

If you liked this Bright Idea, make sure you follow me on Pinterest, Facebook or Instagram.

And for more Bright Ideas from over 100 bloggers, look through the linkup below for ideas that will suit your grade level.

An InLinkz Link-up

Reflecting on the week in KB

I have been a bit of an inconsistent blogger. We have been doing so much great stuff in Kindergarten and the kids are a dream! (well most of the time lol) It is one of those groups of kids that for the rest of their school career people will just say WOW (you know, like the 100 year flood, once in a lifetime and you'll never forget it) Anyway....here is a look at some of the things we have been up to in the last couple of weeks.

Every week we look at a letter in focus and end the week with Friday Funday (also known as double bee Friday, where kids get double the reward - bees on their chart). Every Friday morning, we do craft to compliment the focus letter and 2 Fridays ago we made these fun igloos. We try to incorporate many different art/craft techniques to get students feeling confident in all aspects of art and craft. For this one, we used sponges to do the background with paint, then crayon to colour the small elements on the eskimo and penguins and finally the cutting and gluing onto the painted background. I evn made my kids mount their own artworks, as it gave me a little look at their spacial awareness (could they place it in the middle of the backing page). Then for some fun, I sprayed them all with glitter hairspray (which got me in a tonne of trouble from the cleaner!)

For maths this week, it more dice pattern and numeral ID stuff. The kids got really great at it and by the end of the week ( as we played this game 4 days in a row) I only had 3 kids out of 22 who subitizing was not automatic. And of those 3, 2 of them were only struggling with the number 4 for some reason. You can grab these freebie game mats in my post HERE.

I shared this one on Instagram and FB - we have a new reading corner! I had the shelving, benches and mat, but last weekend my boss bought me this tent at IKEA. All it took was a little rearranging of furniture and ta-da. The kids beg to be able to go and read when they are finished so it is definitely working. Do you have a fun reading corner?

Ahhhhhhh book club! It is one of the best presents! Eve if you have to give it to yourself. With both of my own children at school (in K and Yr1) books are definitely devoured in my house. The top spread is all the ones I bought for home while the bottom row is more to add to the classroom library. And for the second month in a row, my book club bill has been over $100....dont tell the husband please lol.

Thursday we celebrated the 40th anniversary of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We read the story in class and I was surprised to see how many students were not familiar with the story. Then we made these cute headbands to make us look like caterpillars from the story - the kids and the parents loved them! 

We dont just craft in Kinder, but these are the only other pics I took last week. We had a focus on R and made this gorgeous rainbow. The techiniques we use were chipping and gluing and it incorporated a lot of talking about colours as well as the size of the segments of the rainbow. The finished product, with cotton wool cloud, looks so fabulous hung in my room :)

Wow, what a week (and a bit). I will try hard to take photos of some other learning that is going on. AND I am almost ready for a classroom tour now my room is looking so colourful and inviting.

Numeral Identification in Kindergarten

We have been working a lot on identifying dot patterns on dice in the last 2 weeks. We have been rolling and drawing the dot patterns over and over and over! The kids have been getting faster and faster at identifying the patterns and this week we needed to take it somewhere different - and connect it back to numbers.

Some of my kids are quite confident with their numbers to 10 but others are not. With these activities, it gives support and independence to those who can identify numbers but are unsure how to form them by themselves.

So how to play?

Each student needs a dice, sheet and whiteboard marker. Roll the dice, say the number and record the number. Continue with the game until one number "wins".

There are 2 variations for you 1-6 with dot patterns to compliment the numbers or 1-10 with just numerals.

Click either pic to go grab the file from Google docs.

(Sorry for the side alignment here)

Cute graphics by Krista Wallden and Graphics from the Pond

It is a zip file which contains the pdf version of the recording sheet as well as a jpeg version which you can use on your Smartboard and turn it into a whole class demonstration or game.

I would love some feedback on what you think :)

And while you're here, have you bought this awesome Educents bundle yet?

Click to go and have a look at the fabulous goodies you can grab! 

Bright Ideas Blog Hop

Thanks for hopping by!

DOLLAR STORE ITEMS IN THE CLASSROOM

Teachers have the ability to go into a dollar store, pick out random items and turn them into a fantastic learning activity which is engaging and relevant. I just wanted to share a couple of these ideas that I have used in my classroom.

PEGS

You can use pegs for lots of things. Clip charts, hanging artwork...but you can also use them for learning. In the pics below, we are using them to choose the medial vowel sound.

MAGNIFYING GLASSES AND FINGER LIGHTS

You can turn dollar store items into reading aids! I used these with my struggling readers during guided reading time and it was certainly more engaging!

PIPE CLEANERS AND BEADS

A fantastic tool for fine motor which links perfectly to Mathematics. You could use it for patterning, use two different colours to work on addition, or what we did in the pic below, use a tag on each pipe cleaner and students added that many beads.

PLASTIC SHOT GLASSES AND MINI POP STICKS

Another great fun activity. In these pics, I labelled each cup with a number, then students had to place that many sticks into the cup. To extend it for some, I had them order the cups. You could also do it as a colour sort, or even sight words!

I hope you have grabbed some bright ideas from this post. Please leave some of your own in the comments.

Hop on over to 

For her Bright Ideas on sharing Visual spelling strategies with parents.

Or cruise the linky for more

Targeting Maths - Book Giveaway!

I have something else to give away on the blog! Blake Education is a publisher that most Aussie teachers know and have probably used one of their books before. They contacted me to see if I would like to have a look at Targeting Maths.

I really liked the look of this book because it gives you a a range of assessments that could be used from Kinder to Year 2.

It even comes with some blackline posters or anchor charts that can printed and used for reference for your students.

I am definitely going to be using this in the coming weeks as I assess my little ones for reports!

The people at Blake are giving you a chance to win a pack of 3 Lower Primary Targeting Maths books. Just enter the Rafflecopter below. It is open to Australian residents only (sorry!)


a Rafflecopter giveaway


Blake is also having a big end of year sale

Look at some of the fantastic books you can snatch up!

Go and visit http://www.blake.com.au/ for more shopping opportunities  information.