Roll, Count, Add, and Graph

Do you have dice at home?  Great!  You and your child can play Roll, Count, Add (and maybe graph)!  

First mathematicians take two dice and roll them.

Next count the number of dots on each die.

Then add up the two counts of dots.

If you have graph paper, graph the sum of the two dice rolls and see which sum is rolled most often.

Finally, give a pat on the back for practicing addition in a fun way!

Building 3-D Shapes

We are learning about shapes.  For the most part, we have our 2-D shapes down (like rectangle, square, circle, etc.).  So--we've been working on 3-D shapes.  Look what we can do with toothpicks and marshmallows:

We know sphere, cylinder, cube, cone, and pyramid.  What might be fun is to go on a 3-D shape hunt at home.  What 3-D shapes can you find at home?

Update on March Madness

It's time to share more about our March Madness.  Last week we voted on ten books.  This past week we read ten more.  Read on to find out who won!

First up we had two non-fiction books written by the same author:  Steve Jenkins.  Steve Jenkins writes such engaging and easy to understand non-fiction books.  What Do You Do with a Tail Like This went up against Biggest, Strongest, Fastest.  I have to say I was a little surprised at the winner as the students were so excited about the first book.  However, it's a worthy winner:

Ask your child what he or she learned from Steve Jenkins.

Next up was our favorite characters category.  We read Clifford's First School Day by Norman Bridwell and David Goes to School by David Shannon. Although I know students enjoyed both books, it was no surprise which book won:

Ask your child to tell you about what type of a character David is.  Did you know that the character of David was inspired by David Shannon's own writing from kindergarten?  What future published authors might we have in this class?

For our fairy tale part of the bracket, we read The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig.  I thought this might go into overtime, the voting was so close! Look which book came out on top:

Ask your child if he believes the wolf's side of the story or not, and why!

Back in the fiction category, we read Bedhead by Margie Palatini and Tadpole Rex by Kurt Cyrus. The majority of the class voted for:

Ask your child which one he or she voted for and why he or she picked it.  What was his or her favorite part?

We had time for another fairy tale.  This time we took on the traditional tale of Cinderella.  We read CinderEdna by Ellen Jackson and Bigfoot Cinderrrrella by Tony Johnson.  This was another vote that came right down to the wire.  This one came out on top:

Ask your child what connections he or she can make between Bigfoot Cinderrrella and the traditional tale of Cinderella.

Wow!  Was this one of our favorite things about kindergarten!  We'll have to see how these five books stack up against the previous five winners.  Stay tuned!

Why is Handwriting Important?

Learning About Measurement

We have been learning a lot about measurement during this semester.  Whether it's been measuring time, length, or weight, we've done a lot of fun things to help us learn.

One of the first things we did was to learn about standard units of length.  How do we know how long something is?  We've discussed longer and shorter in the past, but we were ready to use some units.
We used our feet to measure things since we had heard the people measure in feet.  We traced our own feet on paper, cut the feet out, and looked for things around the classroom that were about the same size as our foot.

Then we put our feet together to measure longer objects:

We read the story How Big is a Foot and we learned that the king had a problem.  He wanted a bed that was 6 feet by 3 feet.  When the carpenter brought the finished bed to the king, it was too small. How did that happen? The king and the carpenter had different sized feet!  Here we are modeling the king's bed and the carpenter's bed.

Once we realized that a foot should be the same size for everyone, we practiced using rules with inches for our standard unit.  We measured something with rules and then measured the object with our paper feet.  What a difference!

Working on length isn't the only measurement we've tackled.  We've worked on measuring time, measuring weight, and measuring temperature.  With measuring time, we made a thinking map to show all of the different ways we could measure time.  

We sequenced activities from a typical day in kindergarten to help us understand time as well.  We measure time daily with our calendar activities.  With temperature, we graph daily weather, and we know that a thermometer is a tool we use to measure time. We're ready for success with measurement!