Activities! Sorting, Rounding & Multiplying! Plus, Cooperation & (drumroll) Miss Cathy!
Every other Wednesday, we post selections from our vast and wonderful archive of Early Math & Early Childhood Ed activities.
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Hello!
That’s Miss Cathy standing with me today. Like many of you, she is an incredible teacher. I See I Learn stories “star” the students in her class at Ready, Set, Pre-K, but Miss Cathy is a “star,” too. She sets an example. She is always ready to help. She has the best activities planned every day. The children adore her. Parents, too. And Pickle, the bilingual green bulldog, wags his tail and says, “!Woof!” We love Miss Cathy!
This week’s featured I See I Learn story is about collaboration and is available en español, Camila y su equipe (colaboracion), and English, Camille’s Team (cooperation).
Our three featured MathStart stories are:
3 Little Firefighters (sorting)
Coyotes All Around (rounding)
Too Many Kangaroo Things to Do! (multiplying)
Miss Cathy and I can’t wait to get started on all these fun activities!
Your friend,
Stuart
* For my friends in the Boston, mark your calendars! I will be at Beacon Hill Books & Cafe on January 14 for a presentation on my latest book, Show and Tell! Great Graphs and Smart Charts.
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
3 Little Firefighters (sorting)
It's a parade day for the 3 little firefighters and they have to look their best. But their coats are missing buttons and their belly buttons show! Time to get out the button box. Each coat will need 4 buttons. They try to sort them by color, and then by shape, but they can't make enough sets. What if they try sorting by size instead? Ink Spot the dog wants to help!
Sorting by attributes lays the groundwork for understanding number patterns and identifying geometric shapes.
• Level 2, Kindergarten / Grade 1:
Coyotes All Around (rounding)
It's another fine desert day for the counting coyotes: Clumsy, Clever, Cool, Careful and Little One. Clumsy thinks there must be hundreds of roadrunner birds, but Clever thinks that's a little high and encourages the other four coyotes to take a count. When it comes time to add up the totals, Clever says she can do in it her head by using rounding. Instead of adding 21+12+17+8, Clever rounds the numbers and adds 20+10+20+10, estimating the total will be 60. The actual total is 58, so she's pretty close. The coyotes then try counting lizards and grasshoppers. Clever's fast estimating amazes her friends. The story is also filled with lots of coyote factoids.
Rounding and then computing are necessary skills for making sound estimates.
• Level 3, Grades 2 - 4:
Too Many Kangaroo Things to Do (multiplying)
Poor Kangaroo! It's his birthday but everybody's too busy to play with him. Emu has to bake one cake (1 x 1), spread two colors of frosting (1 x 2), decorate the cake with three flowers (1 x 3) and add four big candles (1 x 4). That's 10 Emu things to do when you add them up. The two platypuses, three koalas and four dingoes are likewise occupied with multiple tasks. Multiply each group's tasks, then add the totals together and it equals…a party!
By learning how to multiply by 1, 2, 3, and 4, children are introduced to multiplication, one of the four basic arithmetic operations.
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.
Camila y su equipe (colaboracion)
A Camille le encanta construir castillos de arena en la playa. Pero, es difícil construir un castillo solita. Ve lo que sucede cuando Camille y sus amigos hacen un plan, trabajan juntos, y se divierten.
Aprendiendo como trabajar juntos para lograr una meta ayuda a los niños a desarrollar como respetar a los demás. ¡Los niños aprenden a completar más trabajos - y a divertirse mientras trabajan!
¡Compartir el trabajo! ¡Compartir la diversión!
Camille’s Team (collaboration)
Camille loves to build sand forts at the beach. But it’s hard to build a big fort alone. See what happens when Camille and her friends make a plan, work together, and share the fun.
Learning how to work together to achieve a goal helps children develop mutual respect. Children see that they can get more done—and have more fun doing it!
Share the work. Share the fun!
Do you have a story or a question? Please send me an email!