Five for Friday: May 6th

Hi guys!

I’m back to link up with Kacey from Doodle Bugs Teaching for her Five for Friday linky to share 5 teaching idea from this week!

1. Roll to the Top!

In math, we have been talking about subtilizing strategies and one of the strategies we talked about is recognizing numbers quickly on a dice. I made this “Roll to the Top!” so the kids could have extra practice with counting and eventually subtilizing numbers on a dice.

I have the kids roll and trace the numbers until one number reaches the top. The love seeing which number “wins”. It is pictures above with a marker but I have since laminated a couple copies and set them out with dry erase markers to save on paper.

You can grab the printable above for free by clicking on the image below:

2. Sorting Through Spring

I borrowed the book “Sorting Through Spring” by Lizann Flatt from our local library after I had it recommended to me at a Kindergarten math workshop I attended recently.

I thought this book would only be about sorting but it covers so many concepts! There are pages on patterning, sorting, graphing and more! It is an awesome addition to our math centres!

On the first few days I opened it up to the sorting page and had the kids sort beads by colour. I had the kids use either their hands or the tweezers for a challenge. This was a surprising hit!!

A few days later I switched changed the page to the worm patterning page and added some feathers.

The kids were invited to create patterns here by threading the beads through the feathers. Another great one for fine motor and the kids loved exploring patterning with new materials.

3. Q-Tip Painting on Paper Plates

I’m working on having more intentional art opportunities out for the kids so when I came across this post by @thekinderteacher on Instagram I knew I had to try it! My kids have loved doing q-tip painting activities in the past so I knew this art activity would be right up their alley!

The kids have loved creating different designs all week 🙂

4. Nature Centre

The credit for this one goes 100% to my amazing teaching partner/ECE. She took down our dramatic centre (which was a beach in connection to our ocean inquiry) and set-up this nature centre! It has a variety of materials for the kids to explore, create and imagine with.

When she introduced the centre, she brainstormed with the class what they can do at the centre and recorded their ideas. Then she posted the ideas at the centre for the kids to refer back too.

Here are some of the items available in the centre:

Empty spray bottle, dirt, a variety of seeds, tree house, logs, fake grass, artificial flowers…

toy frogs, pine cones, rocks, bark, toy birds, feathers etc.

On the second day she brainstormed with the class words they might use in the nature centre and now they are in the little white container above. Some of the students have been bringing in things from home as well to add to our nature centre including the butterfly and the treehouse you see above!

They are loving this centre and there has been some amazing pretend play and writing happening here!

5. Canadian Coins

We have started learning about Canadian Coins! I have lots of centres already from last year (you can see my post from last year here) but I whipped up a couple of new centres as well!

This one is “Roll, Find, Match & Cover”. The students roll the dice, find the coin, find a match on the mat and cover it. They keep rolling until all of the coins are covered. I encourage them to say the name of the coin as they cover it. They can play by themselves or race a friend.

This one is called “Coin Value Drop”. This one is a trickier one because they need to know the value of the coin and put it in the right jar! To make these I just cut a slit in the piggy bank pictures (I made them just slightly bigger than the coin so it is slightly self-correcting) removed the inner metal circle of the lid and replaced it with the piggy bank circle I had cut out (I hope that makes sense!). The kids enjoyed this one too!