Book Review

One of my goals my first year of teaching Kindergarten was to enhance my math curriculum.  One way I found to do that was by doing read alouds to start some of my lessons.  It's a great way to combine math and reading and my kids always love it. 
   Today we read Leaping Lizards from the Math Start 1 series by Stuart Murphy.

 We have been practicing skip counting and this book counts by 5's and 10's to 50's.  We counted by 5's by giving high 5's, we have done funny voices as we count by 10's and today we counted lizards by 5's and 10's as we read this book.

If you haven't checked out the Math Start series check it out.  My library has many from the series or you can find it here on Amazon.

Literacy Centers from the Dollar Store

I'm all about saving money and time, so it should be no surprise that the dollar spot at Target and the Dollar Store are my favorite places to look for things for my store.  One of my popular reading centers in the beginning of the year is a matching ABC center.  I bought these cut outs at the Dollar Tree, wrote a capital letter on one set, and a lower case letter on the other set and easy peasy, you've created a fun center that only cost you a $1 and 5 minutes of time.

Apple Themed 10 Frames

So I'm constantly looking for an activity to do with my mini erasers that I stock pile from Target.  Last week one of my kids saw all my little tubs of erasers and commented "Wow that is a lot!"  Can I have some?"  Is it bad that I said no to a 5 year old?  I mean, I don't need hundreds of mini erasers but they sure make learning fun.

My latest creation allows my kids to use my apple mini erasers to fill ten frames.  We have been practicing our numbers and this not only allows the kids to visually see number but allows them to practice counting.

Apple Ten Frames


This product comes with a color and black & white version of the ten frames up to 20 along with 4 worksheets for additional practice.

Greater than/Less than Game

In Kindergarten, making learning into a game always helps keep little 5 year olds engaged and they don't often realize that they are practicing the skills you are learning.  This week we've been comparing numbers.  We've compared objects and numbers.

I then found this free and simple dice comparison game on TPT.

I also created a simple game with some paper bags that I had an abundance of and playing cards because for some reason we had 7 decks at home plus the 2 decks at home which was perfect for partnering the students up.  I removed all the kings, queens and jacks and split up the kids into groups of 2.  The game was simple.  Whoever had the bigger number would place their card in the bag that said greater and whoever had the smaller number would place it in the bag that said less.  If the cards were the same number they would put it in the bag labeled equal.  The best part is there is no winner.  No tears.  No one gets upset.  To them its just fun and they get to practice comparing numbers.

The game is also differentiated because the kids can read the numbers or they can count the objects on the card if they can't read the number.

You can also use uno cards or dominos if you don't have playing cards.  You can even put this in your math center rotation.  So many options and the prep is minimal!

Letter Sort

When learning the alphabet, different fonts can be so confusing to little ones, especially when it comes to the letter a and g.  So I created a sort for my kindergartners to help them practice sorting uppercase letters from lowercase letters and to visually see the different ways you can write them.  Plus it's an easy way for me to show them book g because no matter how many times I try to write it the fancy way, as I call it in my classroom, I just can't.  So check out this free product in my TPT store here.  This cut and paste letter sort contains the letters:

a
b
d
f
g
i
j
q
t
y

Letter Sort

What's the missing letter center

So learning how to put things in alphabetical order is such an important and yet boring skill.  So to help my students practice abc order and fluency in a fun way I created this product.

Missing Letter Center

This fun activity allows students to fill in the missing alphabet letter with an expo marker and comes in an upper case and lower case set.

This product can be found here at my TPT store.