Activities! Sequencing! Adding! A Song about Negative Numbers! And Percy Listens Up!
The Stuart J. Murphy Activities Newsletter comes out every other Wednesday, filled with selections from a vast and wonderful archive of Early Math & Early Childhood Ed activities.
Please tell your friends, colleagues, librarians & parents!
It’s FREE!
Listen up, everybody!
Listening is a very important skill that can help a child succeed in school and in life, too.
This week’s I See I Learn story—Percy Listens Up—is about how Percy, who loves to play, but is a little iffy on listening, learns that you don’t listen, you can miss out on a lot of important things (including the arrival of the ice-cream truck at the park!)
Listening shows respect for what other people have to say. Careful listening helps children understand directions, learn new things, be safe, and have more fun!
•••••••••••
The week’s featured MathStart stories are:
Rabbit’s Pajama Party (sequencing) Have you ever been to a pajama party? Fun!
Animals on Board (adding) Can you add up all the animals?
Less Than Zero (negative numbers) Page down for toe-tapping song from The Main Street Kids’ Club: A MathStart Musical!
Your friend, working on his listening skills for back-to-school, while planning a pajama party, counting all animals in the neighborhood, and singing along to that hit song, Perry the Penguin (“he’s a whole waddle of fun!”),
Stuart
Mathstart is a series of 63 storybooks organized into three levels for Pre-K through Grade 4. Each story teaches a different mathematical skill.
You can buy individual books, sets by level, or a complete library! Here is list of where to find MathStart books!
• Level 1, Pre-K / Kindergarten:
Rabbit’s Pajama Party (sequencing)
Rabbit throws the best sleep over parties! There's pizza, hot fudge sundaes, sleeping bags, scary stories and more. Can you remember what happened first? Then next? And after that?
Sequencing is a key concept in math as well as story comprehension.
• Level 2, Kindergarten / Grade 1:
Animals on Board (adding)
Wow! It's a caravan of trucks, each carrying an exotic load. There are three tigers on the first truck, followed by two more on the next truck. How many tigers in all? Then come trucks filled with different numbers of swans, frogs, horses and even pandas. How many are there of each animal? And where are they headed? And what's hidden under the tarp of driver Jill's extra-wide truck?
Simple addition equations help children to understand basic arithmetical operations.
• Level 3, Grades 2 - 4:
Less Than Zero (negative numbers)
It is so much fun to be a penguin—especially when you can swirl around on your very own ice scooter. Perry really wants one, but they cost 9 clams and he doesn't have a clam to his name. Then mom pays him 4 clams to trim the ice in front of their house. Perry decides to make a chart to track his savings. So far, so good! But then he goes to the Ice Circus with Fuzzy and it costs 5 clams. Fuzzy lends him the extra clam and now Perry is in debt and has to mark his chart at "-1." When Baldy loans him 2 clams for a Fishy Float, the total dips even further, to "-3." Will Perry be able to climb out of negative number territory, pay back his friends, and make enough money for a scooter? Good thing there's always plenty of snow to shovel!
The introduction of negative numbers extends a child's knowledge of the number system and is an important concept in algebra.
Activity PDF
The Perry the Penguin song from the hit show, The Main Street Kids’ Club: A MathStart Musical:
ATTENTION TEACHERS! 20% off on book sets on the I See I Learn store!
I See I Learn is a series of 16 stories that follow the adventures of the children in Miss Cathy’s class at Ready, Set Pre-K in See-and-Learn City (see map).
Each story focuses on a different social, emotional, health & safety and cognitive skill important for success in school and in life. For Pre-K / Kindergarten.
Percy Listens Up (listening)
Percy loves to play. Sometimes this means that he forgets to listen to his teachers or his mommy. He misses out on fun in school and at the pool. But see what always makes Percy listen!
Listening shows respect for what other people have to say. Careful listening helps children understand directions, learn new things, be safe, and have more fun.
Listen up, everyone!
FREE PDF POSTER
Do you have a story or a question? Please send me an email!