Friday, January 13, 2012

First Snow Day!

Today is our first snow day of the year. Where I live, we get out a lot for snow. Usually by this time we've been out several days. But our winter has been really mild. I live in the mountains so it doesn't take a lot of snow to get us out of school. But I didn't get to sleep in. I still got up around 6 like I usually do. I've been catching up on my blog stalking and pinning. I can tell I'm back in school because I just don't seem to have time to blog like I want to. I've seen several linky parties I'd like to participate in and have a few ideas to blog about. So maybe I'll spend some of my day writing some posts to schedule to publish. I've got to go into school and get my external hard drive to finish working on my valentine's day packet and my lesson plans for the week.
Report cards were suppose to go out today. I'm glad I got all my assessments done and the report cards done so I don't have to worry about that. When doing our math assessments, I noticed a few areas that some of my kids still need to work on. They don't seem to have a great concept of number still. I'm really struggling with figuring out common core and our new math series. The unit I should be on in math is about fractions and ordinal numbers. This isn't in common core. At least not that I can see. I've looked and looked through them. And after doing assessments I think we need to work more on our numbers 11-20 and composing and decomposing those numbers. I also have some kids that need to work on one to one correspondence still. My math instruction seems to be suffering this year and I need to get a handle on it. I've focused so much on reading and writing that my time seems to get away from me. Then I'm left with like 20 minutes or so to teach math. I do review a lot of math concepts during morning meeting so maybe I need to add more in there. I also have a couple of math centers in my center rotation. I'd love to do math stations but I just don't have the time in my schedule. Because about 5 of my students leave at 12:30 I can't teach new concepts after this time. I guess that doesn't mean that I can't do some math stations then. Now that I've rambled on about where I'm at in math, I'd love to hear your take on it. Those of you that have adopted common core what are you doing about concepts that aren't included in common core but seem important. Like fractions, patterns, calendar, ordinal numbers. I would love to hear what you do in your class with math.
I also have a freebie for you for practicing writing numbers. There are five documents included in this freebie. Different way to practice the numbers and a blank one for differentiation. This meets this common core standard:
  • K.CC.3. Write numbers from 0 to 20. Represent a number of objects with a written numeral 0-20 (with 0 representing a count of no objects).

Click here to get this file.
Please leave me some comment love if you download this document. I'd love to hear about your math.


Freebie Fridays

4 comments:

  1. Enjoy your day!

    Tammy
    www.foreverin1st.blogspot.com

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  2. Kerri, I'm in pre-k now but I taught kindergarten for over 15 years. I think one of the keys is integration. Include some ordinal numbers and counting within your reading groups. Books like "The Napping House" lend themselves very nicely to talk about things like "Which character did we see in the book first? second?" and so on. I also use a lot of music to teach ordinal numbers, one-to-one correspondence, counting, and much more. I particularly like Dr. Jean Feldman and Jack Hartmann. They have really wonderful songs for kindergartners. If you have more questions, leave me a comment on my blog and I can share more ideas. I'm also having a contest to giveaway a 100th Day packet that I have on TPT.

    Sharon Dudley, NBCT
    http://teachingwithsight.blogspot.com

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  3. I think you have to trust that they will get these concepts later on (although I haven't found patterns in the first grade common core, either...preschool?). It will take some time before the text books catch up with the common core (why did we jump right in without the resources?). I like to use Drops in the Bucket and their kindergarten level works but not first grade (it includes money and time and measurement). I am hoping everything will work out sooner than later!

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  4. Love these! These will be perfect for my kiddos to practice writing their numbers. I still have quite a few that can't write the numbers in order through 20.

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