In kindergarten this week we've been focusing on U.S. coins! Students spent time exploring the penny, nickel, dime, and quarter. We discussed the characteristics of each as well as matched the value to each coin. We also enjoyed hands on activities, incorporated technology with Seesaw, and practiced working in our math workbooks!
M.A.T.H. Workshop
This year, I wanted to change up the framework to my math block time. I'm trying out the M.A.T.H. workshop approach created by Laura Santos from her blog Core Inspiration. I love that each letter of the word MATH represents a center during rotations (keeps it super simple for my kinders):
M- meet with teacher (teacher small groups)
A- at your seat (review or independent worksheet)
T- technology (Seesaw or other app)
H- hands on (centers activities)
It's my first time with this new approach to our math block, but so far I'm really enjoying it. We're still in the beginning stages where we're spending a lot of time with whole group practice of each type of center. So, this week we were focusing on the technology piece; utilizing Seesaw and practicing how to use the tools to complete the assignments.
At Your Seat
As a part of practicing center procedures we spent quite some time practicing how to work at the "at your seat" center. For this, students are to complete a quick review page where they either turn their work into me or it's a page to glue into their math notebooks. This page will act as the independent practice component of my math mini-lesson and the exit ticket to their centers.
This week, I modeled how to complete each page for each coin and how to glue their work in. I use the phrase: "x marks the spot" when it comes to using glue sticks to glue their work in. Oftentimes my kinders will waste time/glue gluing their work in. So, by giving them the prompt "x marks the spot" they know to make one big "x" and to place their paper on top. Done!
Here, students are working to identify each coin then sort the coins depending on if it is that specific coin or not. These photos are when we worked on the penny.
You can find this unit about coins (as well as the year-long math curriculum for kindergarten!) in my resource
here.
Technology: Seesaw
Like I mentioned, this week I really wanted to focus our attention to how to complete assignments via Seesaw. I love using Seesaw as a means for students to demonstrate their learning because of the technology component, but also because the iPad is highly engaging for this generation of kids. Seesaw is a great platform for students to use because there are a variety of tools they can use to demonstrate their understanding of a concept!
For our study of U.S. coins, I gave students a virtual sorting mat and they had to sort 2 types of coins at a time. There were six pages total for them to complete where the types of coins to sort changed. They had a lot of success with this activity and it required them to use the hand tool to drag and drop as well as know that some activities have multiple slides, or pages, to complete.
Here are a few of my kinders engaging with their sorting activity on Seesaw...
Hands On
This week I took the opportunity to practice sorting with actual play coins using my set of coins and
this free printable sorting mat created by
Sweet Firsties. We first practiced whole group where I gave each student a coin and they had to come up to the document camera and sort it in the correct spot. We discussed how sorting helps us group objects (in this case our coins) by something they have in common and tied it to our study of coins.
Then, once students began to finish their Seesaw assignment I pulled them to the back table with me so I could work with them on sorting actual coins. I plan to place this activity as an independent "hands on" center, but wanted the time to work with various students first.
Supplemental Resources
There are a variety of resources my team and I used this week for our mini-lessons about coins.
Here are a few!
Anchor Chart: I created a similar anchor chart with the basics of what we taught for the week. I made the 4 quadrants and filled them as we learned about each coin. By the end of the week our chart looked similar to this:
Videos: To supplement our lessons here are a few videos the kids watched.
For each coin study we used these videos (although kind of slow, but has good info):
penny,
nickel,
dime,
quarter. By Friday we reviewed the coins we learned by watching these videos:
And that's about it for this week in math! I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and here's to another week of fun learning!
