Geometry and Spatial Sense

I hope you are having a restful vacation and not spending too much time thinking about teaching.

I finally finished the math section of kindergarten-lessons.com by adding a "Geometry & spatial sense" page. This page links with the pages on attribute blocks, sorting games, and classification games that also have activities for geometry and spatial sense. One way to introduce shapes is to have a special day for each one. Scatter these throughout the first half of the year. My shape days are, "Little Circle Day", "Mr. or Mrs. Square Day", "Rectangle Train Day", and "Christmas Triangle Day" (triangles are great for making Christmas trees and stars). Talking about the special days a week in advance familiarizes the children with the vocabulary, and they look forward to the shape day.

Ask parents to send clean empty paper boxes and tubes in various shapes. Store these in a box and bring them out to play with at center time. They won't last too long but different shaped boxes offer many opportunities to use new math vocabulary.

Claustrophobic classrooms? - Time to declutter
If your classroom is making you yearn for open spaces, maybe it's time to declutter. If certain center areas take too long for students to tidy, spend some time thinking about how you can make the spaces less of a hodgepodge of objects. One year, I realized that in my dramatic play center there were just too many toys, many donated by former students' parents, and it was time for a purge. After all, the purpose of the center is for imaginative play! In other areas of the classroom, some items may sit on shelves year after year and hardly ever get used. It feels great to heave them out and have a more spacious environment.

Rotate materials
Buying too many manipulatives, puzzles, and games can also create a cluttered classroom. Divide materials into three boxes and rotate them every month. Often when you reintroduce the same items to the class, thinking and creativity increase and the students come up with new ways of using familiar items.

Power of Ten
I am not sure how many of you are familiar with the Power of Ten math teaching method. I have used it with my kindergarten students and was amazed at how many of them were able to tell me "what makes ten" by the end of the year.

The Power of Ten is a set of visual ten-frame cards designed to help students develop number sense and is based on the premise that over eighty percent of learning is visual.

The students played games that taught them to identify each card by its number name. When they knew what each card was called, they played games that taught them which cards, when put together, created a complete ten card. They could easily see for instance, how the two card fitted perfectly with the eight card to make a complete ten card. More concepts are then introduced.

Visit the Power of Ten site for more information.

http://www.poweroften.ca/

Happy teaching,
Patricia
kindergarten-lessons.com