Hello Everyone! I’m your guest blogger today here at Kindergarten Smorgasbord. I’m so thankful to Greg for giving me the opportunity and wish him the best in his new married life.
I’m Laura and I blog over at Kinder Kraziness. You know, the kindergarten teacher who found out she was pregnant over the summer and has not figured out how to adjust and blog regularly. Yep that’s me. You can click on my button to check me out.
I’m going to share with you a post that I just posted about a week ago and it seemed to go over well with those of us that are new to Common Core.
We’ve been working hard at decomposing numbers. This is a new concept for us here in Tennessee, since we just started Common Core. I’ve got to say, this was even a hard concept for me. I had to get my thoughts away from “subtraction” because it’s not subtracting. It’s just breaking numbers apart without taking anything away.
Y’all, if this was hard for me to wrap my head around, just imagine my 5 year old students. Holy Cow!
Luckily, I have a wonderful teacher across the hall from me and she formed a great lesson for this and I honestly piggy-backed right off of her. Some things were a little different for my class, because let’s just face it, I have a very different group this year. I still feel like I need to be teaching them behavior skills, not splitting numbers apart.
But I digress, we started out the lesson reading 5 Little Monkeys. After we read it, I let a few act it out. I have a little stage in my room to use with the SMART Board, so 5 were up on the stage “in bed” 1 jumped off. Are there still 5 monkeys? Yes, he’s still there, just in a different place. How many are in the bed? 4 How many are on the floor? 1. Good, read the next page. Are there still 5 monkeys? Yes. How many are in the bed? 3 How many are on the floor? 2 So we still have 5 monkeys, right? Right!
That part went well. The next day (my observation day, btw), we reviewed and then added counters to the problem. We did this as a group on the SMART Board first. And it looked like this:
Three little monkeys fell off the bed, 2 are still on the bed. Then you have those important questions. How did you know to move three monkeys to the left box? I kept getting answers like, because the book said so or because the dots tell you too. The first answers I was like..really? We aren’t even reading the book right now. The second answer my reply, “Yes. The dots do tell us, but HOW do they tell us?” Blowing their minds!!! When I started asking them about the colors of the dots, some of them started to catch on. “OOOHHH, the RED dots tell us there are 3 monkeys and the YELLOW dots tell us there are 2 monkeys.
Then we added another element. We wrote numbers in the box to bring it together. How we have 5 dots, but we can “take it apart” and make the numbers 3 and 2. What else can we do?
Last part, was my closure. We came back to the table and I gave them a sheet that looked just like my table. It had 5 circles that needed to be colored in. They needed to come up with a problem. Then they cut out monkeys to solve their problem and then if they could, they added numbers.
I have 20 students. Here is how it broke down.
4 students had NO CLUE still what was going on. One even colored in ALL circles RED and put 3 monkeys in 1 box and 2 in the other.
2 students made a pattern with their circles RED YELLOW RED YELLOW RED but they both had 3 monkeys in one box and 2 in the other. So it kind of made sense to them. Almost there
14 students BAM! Nailed it! Out of those 14, 10 were able to add their numbers to the problem.
So we still have a little work to do with some, but I was very happy with the result. Tomorrow, we will do larger numbers and will talk about bonding the parts back together. In other words..composing.
Welcome to the new 1st grade!
Here is a freebie for you. This is my recording sheet that I used for the closure.
