Young Mathematicians at Work!

HAPPY 100TH DAY OF SCHOOL!!!

On Tuesday of this week, we had a fun filled day celebrating with lots of activities about the number 100!  We have been counting the days in school since the first day of school.  We learned to count by ones and skip count by tens and fives. We kept track using our bead string, number line and ten frames in the classroom. On the 100th day, we worked together in groups to construct a paper chain that is 100 links long.  We also joined together with K-002 in a 100th Day Parade down the 4th Floor hallway!

In math, we began a new unit this month on investigating how numbers can be made up of two or more parts.  This is called the part, part, whole relationship of numbers.  This is a very important number concept for early number sense, one that is built upon as students learn addition, subtraction and place value.   When students are exploring parts of a number they need to work with numbers in a variety of ways and with a variety of concrete materials.  We have begun to do this through rich contexts, or stories, and through different games and activities.

For example, we read a story called The Sleepover.  In the story a little girl and 7 of her friends change positions on a bunk bed, some sitting on the top bunk and some sitting on the bottom bunk.  It starts with 4 kids on the top and then 4 kids on the bottom.  Then one kid moves to the bottom bunk so now there are 3 kids on the top and 5 kids on the bottom.  This can be written as two equivalent expressions: 4+4=3+5.  Kindergarteners had to think of more ways the eight kids could sit on the bunk bed.  We continued to explore this context but changed the number of kids on the bunk bed. Students had an opportunity to create their own bunk bed stories using numbers other than 8. They worked on finding all the different ways that number of kids could be on their bunk beds and showed different ways to represent those ways on their paper. Here is some of our work:

Wishing you all a fun and restful winter break!