Crayons & Cuties In Kindergarten: Working With Numbers, CVC Words and Our Interactive Notebooks was SNOW much fun!

So my kinders have been working on ordering numbers 0-10 and our unit finishes up tomorrow!

This week we worked with ordinal numbers and number lines.

To make the number line more 'concrete' we built a HUGE one in our classroom! Each child got to 'walk the line' and then we used ourselves as 'markers' to find 'one more,' 'one fewer' and numbers 'between!' So far our number line is still in tact! Several of them have been referencing it all week while working on number ordering tasks!

For ordinal numbers we played 'Mitten Line Up!'

We practiced laying out our mittens in 'ordinal order' from first through tenth.

Then everyone in the group would close their eyes as I hid one snowball under a mitten:

The students then took turns asking the following question:

"Is the snowball hiding under the ___ordinal name__ mitten?

We would lift to find out...

If it wasn't under the selected mitten, the next person would go until the snowball was found!

And then the person that guessed correctly got to keep the snowball and we would play again! At the end we counted up our snowballs to find out who had the most!

For some of my groups I kept the mittens facing up- challenging them to remember which were already picked. For other groups, we flipped them over after they were selected and they would then choose from the mittens still facing up.

The students LOVED it so much they took it upon themselves to play again during choice time!

We continued to work with ordinal numbers and talked about the 'order' in which you put your clothes on to get ready to go outside in winter! We made this flip book together as a class

and then they used their flip book to answer questions- ex- What did you put on ninth? They would flip up 'ninth' and answer. It also helped review winter clothing vocabulary for my ELLs!

Some of my students went so far as to match their flip book to the colors of the mittens from the game!

The back of the flip book explained the activity to the parents and gave them some ideas for questions to use at home to review ordinal numbers. I teach in NY, so we have an additional K.CC.4 standard (d) to teach ordinal numbers to the tenth position. This activity and game really helped reinforce a difficult concept!

I bundled the game and activity together and it is available here:

The kids were having so much fun with it that I made them a gumball and cookie jar set too! I put the gumball set in our early finishers basket and the cookie jar set will be part of our math stations for next week!

As you can see, it is already being put to good use! They are loving these games!

Our other focus this week was CVC words!

We worked with them all week during Word Work and in centers. Today we turned learning into a fun winter project!

Students selected pictures of CVC items (ex mop, box, pig, jam, net) and then 'tapped out' the word and wrote it on their snow globe. Later on they visited the art table to add snowflake stamps and glitter...because everything is better with glitter!

Now we have a fun and festive seasonal display of CVC word learning!

Want to try it- it was SUPER easy! I gave each child a 9x12 piece of white construction paper. I had them make a large circle and cut it out.

I had pre-cut the bases- basically I took a 9x6 piece of blue and just cut off the edges.

I printed strips of the phrase 'SNOW'-tastic CVC Words', cut them out and then had them paste it to the base. They selected CVC picture cards that I had printed for centers from our CVC Word Building trains and wrote the words. I had fun snowflake stamps (from my days of being a scrapbooker!) for them to use and we put silver and iridescent glitter 'accents'!

Of course our week wouldn't be complete without a winter chart! We charted what we knew, what we wanted to learn and added in info as we learned (not shown in this picture-I forgot to take another picture of all we learned)! We will continue to add to it next week! I always try to use different color markers to help ID what we knew, want to know and what we learned.

New this week was our 'let's talk about what we learned' chart! To encourage my kids to begin discussions about their learning with more independence and less 'prodding' from me, I developed this idea. Whenever a child tells me what s/he learned (w/o me prompting) we add their name and what they said to the chart!

It will also serve as a visual track for me as to who still needs to work on this!

So what is in store for us for next week...

I'm breaking out my HUGE mitten as we learn all about The Mitten by Jan Brett! I stitched this gem nearly 10 years ago and it is still going strong! The masks are from Jan Brett's website. After reading, they will each get a turn to choose what animal they want to be and then climb into the mitten! The mitten is big enough for 3 of them, but we keep it at one at a time! Their favorite part is when I climb in! I can't wait!

We will also be able to read the book 'on our own' with this adapted version I created!