NEWSLETTER

Christmas Trees

This week we extended our number exploration to build Christmas Trees with unifix cubes. After matching our large number sheets and identifying each number together, we moved the tables to explore our numbered trees and the cubes. Before beginning any math work the children spent some time exploring the cubes and doing whatever they wanted with them. This exploratory play portion of the activity is very important! Children naturally want to play with new materials so they should have that time before focusing on a task. This play period also gives the children an opportunity to "get to know" the material and what it can do. This is a different process for each child and gives them some prior experience with the material before working with it. 

The goal of this experience was to practice the math skills of number recognition and counting and the fine motor skills of putting together and pulling apart the cubes. Some of the children decided to place the cubes in groups next to each other instead of stack them into towers, which was another way to organize each set of cubes. As each number was called out and displayed, the children had to find that tree on their sheet and point to it. Once they found the correct number, they built a tree with that amount of cubes. We then pointed to each cube as we counted them (one-to-one correspondence), identified the total number of cubes (cardinality), and made sure it matched the number on the tree (number recognition). Once the trees were built and the cubes counted, they could leave the tree standing or move the cubes to a group on the tree. This alternative display was created by the children and added a twist to the experience if they chose to do it. 

Ornament Color Matching

Our classroom is filled with many small/quick transition experiences. These experiences get the children up and moving, and typically require them to complete one task during the transition time. This week we used colored Christmas lights to find like-colored items in our classroom. The children were randomly given a colored light and had to search the room for something that was the same color. Once they found something that matched they had to announce that they "had a match!" and we all went to see what they found. This was a fun way to practice color recognition and to see how colors may vary a little bit based on what object it is on/what surface it is on. This game will progress to finding a certain number of objects of each color and then comparing and contrasting the different amounts.