Five for Friday: May 8

Another week down!

I'm back to link up with Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching to share five things from my week! :)

and I'm also linking up with Teaching Blog Addict for Freebie Friday.

You can find the freebies under 2 and 3.

We introduced new play dough mats!

These alphabet play dough mats have been a huge hit and a great support for the kids who need it.

This is a free download from This Reading Mama!

Our caterpillars are growing so fast!

We have been making observations every day.

Here is what are observation table looks like most days.

Magnifying glasses, caterpillar/butterfly books, pencils, crayons, observation sheets, hanging folders (to keep their observation sheets/book covers in) and mini cubes to measure the caterpillars with.

Mid week my ECE partner transferred the caterpillars over to the net with the kids.

They were so excited to watch her! 

Click on the image below if you would like to check out the butterfly observation and other printables in my TPT store :)

We are still working hard on mastering addition and subtraction!

We practiced with these addition and subtraction sticker stories this week.

Click here to grab the template for free!

We made this craft for our mom's this week!

I got the idea from Food, Love & Life.

This is my sample.

And we did a directed drawing and drew our moms.

They drew in pencil, I outlined it for them with a Sharpie and then they coloured it in with crayon.

Then I glued them onto manila folders and laminated them for durability.

Here is my sample...

And these are by the kids!

We put our flower craft inside and sent them home!

I hope the moms love them!

One area of focus for our team for the next 2 months is problem-solving and supporting students through solving open-ended and higher-order thinking questions.

We decided on several different questions to try and here is the first one.

First I did this activity with them whole group.

I did an example then I had some students come up and create a pattern with pattern blocks for me.  Then I drew their pattern and we circled the core and labelled the pattern together.

Then students were able to try these prompts at centre time.
Here is an amazing one that one of my kiddos made.

At first I told him, "remember we are solving the problem not just building!" To this he replied I did solve the problem! It's an ABABCB pattern and the second shape is a yellow hexagon!"

!!!

I looked closely and realized he was right.
What a creative thinker! I was blown away!
(Although he missed the "using 10 pattern blocks" part of the instructions.. but I let that fly since I was so impressed with his creativity!)

I had some of my kids try a similar but different problem and record their ideas as well.

We were so happy with how it went!
It's making it's way onto an interactive math board which I will share soon ;)

That's it from me!

I hope you have a great weekend!

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Teaching Money in FDK

Today I'm popping in to talk about all the money fun we have been having in our class lately!

The FDK expectation for money is..

NS1.10 explore different Canadian coins, using coin manipulatives

First we started by watching the song Canada in My Pocket by Michael Mitchell.

Then we used my coin posters to learn the name and value of each coin.

Sidenote: Sorry about the glare in some of these pictures... lamination and classroom lights are not friends... ;( 

We also added these word wall cards to our math word wall so that the students could use them whenever they needed.

At centre time we worked on sorting coins by kind...

and many students completed this "My Book of Canadian Coins" booklet.

Here are all the different versions. I pick and choose which version(s) to set out depending on the ability of that class. Or we do them in small groups and I copy the booklet that's just right for each student :)

On the second day we watched this Canadian Coin Song.

and I also introduced them to the Coin Spot game from TVOKids.com which they LOVE every year.

Update: I just found out while teaching Canadian Coins this year that this game is no longer available on TVO kids.. which is so sad because it was such a great game! If anybody knows of a good alternative please let me know!

I introduced a few more new centres...

Here is a patterning centre using coins:

On the third day I introduced them to the coin poem...

and then left it out as an option to de- and reconstruct the poem during centre time.

My ECE pulled a small group of kids who were not quite fluent with coin names and values to work on co-constructing this anchor chart.

For a challenge I put out these add and match the value cards one day for my high kiddos...

and we also played "Feed the Piggie"

The students pick a card, read it and put that many coins in the piggy bank! You can also put the sentence strip out and invite the students to count how many coins are in the piggy bank when they are finished.

If that was too easy there was a challenge option which included writing the number of cents and dollars in the piggy bank.

If you are interested in any of these activities you can find them in my newest product

"All About Canadian Coins"!

Click on the pictures below if you are interested!

My kids are really fluent with coins now and we are ready to move on!

Do you have any tried and true money/coin teaching ideas for Kindergarten?

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Added: April 13, 2023

I'm popping in to update this post with a few new things that were added since I wrote the original blog post!

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!

This is "Roll & Cover"! My students love this one! They can play on their own or with a partner. If they are playing on their own, they just roll and cover until their mat is full. If they are playing with a partner, each person grabs a mat and they take turns rolling the dice. The first person to cover all of their coins is the winner!

This one is for working on coin identification and initial sounds! An easy way to integrate some literacy into math centre time!

Also since writing the original blog post, we've been through a pandemic and online learning, which made Google Slides resources extremely popular! Most teachers are back in the classroom but still use the Google Slides for centres, whole group learning etc.! They work well especially if you have a SMARTBoard!

You can see more of what's included in the preview below. Here's the link if you're interested in the Google Slides version: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Digital-Math-for-Kindergarten-Canadian-Coins-Google-Slides-6456315

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