Our kids love play dough but I wanted new play dough mats that were a little bit harder and worked on some of the skills we had been working about recently. So over the winter break I made these play dough mats that go from 1-20. The 1-10 mats have a big numeral, a ten-frame to show the number with manipulatives or play dough, a number line where you can cover the number and some other representations of the number at the bottom to reinforce subitizing skills.
The 11-20 mats have the big numeral, 2 ten-frames and hands to show the number. I purposely used the hands because we’re going to be learning about skip-counting soon and I want to use these to reinforce skip-counting by 5 🙂
The kids have been loving using the mini erasers with these mats! So many of them are now able to create the teen numbers and they are so proud 🙂
2. FEELINGS WRITING
Since recognizing and naming feelings is part of the curriculum (SRWB 1.3) and “am” was the sight word for this week, I decided to combine the two into this writing invitation!
After we learned the sight word “am”, we did an example together and then I set the sheets out with mirrors. The students were invited to write about how they were feelings today and draw their face and make their face match the emotion they wrote down. They were invited to look closely at their face using the mirror and add details.
If you would like to try this activity with your class you can grab the printable by
clicking here or on the image below:
3. DIGRAPH BOOKLETS
This week we also started learning about digraphs!
We learned the digraph “ch” and made this anchor chart together to reinforce the sound it makes.
Then I set out these digraph booklets for the kids to practice the new sound at centre time.
The kids colour the word, trace the word, print the word and then colour the picture.
You can grab these digraph booklets and lots of other digraph activities in the my digraphs pack on TPT. You can
click here or click on the image below if you are interested in checking it out!
4. MEASUREMENT PROVOCATION
We always have lots of number sense, shape, patterning and sorting activities out for the kids to explore but I find that we were not providing them with enough measurement opportunities. So one day I set out this measurement provocation. It’s super simple. I just put 3 types of math manipulatives out (and different sized bears to see who would notice and use only one size when measuring) and picked a few items from around the classroom for the kids to measure.
Then after the first few days I started to allow some of the kids to choose items from around the classroom and set-up this provocation for me. So far they have been doing a great job with this!
5. BUILDING CHALLENGE
Here’s another way we have incorporated more measurement into our math-based centre block. We recently got these pretty translucent blocks so before I add them to our building area I made this centre with just the translucent blocks and some snap cubes. Then I added the prompt “can you make something that is taller than 10 cubes?”
Here is one of our kiddos doing an amazing job with this challenge!
He was so proud of his work and asked me to print a copy after I took the picture so he could take it home and show his mom 😉
We’re planning to continue these building challenges by changing up the manipulatives, numbers and measurement vocabulary (shorter, wider, a combination etc.)
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